Multilingual name servers, perhaps a fateful next step

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: David Allen <David_Allen_AB63 () post harvard edu>
Date: May 16, 2006 8:09:15 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Multilingual name servers, perhaps a fateful next step

Dave,

Last week in Geneva there was followup to China's earlier story, that  
for a couple years already it has been operating with fully  
multilingual name resolution.  At an ITU UNESCO meeting on the subject,

http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/worksem/multilingual/index.html

a number of other countries discussed their own ML.ML rollouts, with  
a wider selection of other language scripts.  The organization MINC

http://www.minc.org

began the process of coordinating among them.  In the meeting there  
was a gathering momentum around this.

Bellow is one of the resulting news reports.  (Despite implications  
of 'newness' in the second last para, China has been operating for  
awhile in fact - in March the important event was an awakening to the  
reality by the rest of the world.)

For IP if useful.

David

David Allen
Co-Principal
Collab CPR
(World Collaboration for Communications Policy Research)
______

Challenge to US control of website names
  By Frances Williams in Geneva
  Published: May 12 2006 18:42 | Last updated: May 12 2006 18:42

Fed up with the lack of an international system for internet  
addresses using non-western scripts, many countries are joining China  
in creating their own.

These moves are seen as a direct challenge to the authority of the US- 
based body that runs the international domain name system and a  
potential threat to the universality of the worldwide web.

A United Nations-sponsored meeting on the multilingual internet this  
week called for faster progress in introducing so-called  
internationalised domain names (IDNs), which are seen as an essential  
tool in spreading internet use and combating the digital divide  
between rich and poor nations.

Icann (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers),  
which operates the global internet address system under the authority  
of the US commerce department, has been working for several years on  
IDNs and says it will be ready to start technical tests of an  
international naming system later this year.

But many countries have not bothered to wait and, like China, have  
found their own technical solutions. According to Subramanian  
Subbiah, co-founder of i-DNS.net, a Singapore company that sells  
internet domain names based on non-Roman characters, 2m such names  
have been registered since 1999 in nearly 40 countries.

Although 90 per cent of these names are in Chinese, Japanese and  
Korean - which share a common character set - other countries using  
IDNs include India, Thailand, Russia, Greece, Brazil, Israel, Iran  
and a number of Arab states.

Icann has been wrestling with the technical problems of ensuring that  
a web address typed in any language directs users to the same site.

But Robert Shaw, internet adviser to the Geneva-based International  
Telecommunication Union, says countries are putting a higher priority  
on accessibility in their own language than on the "pure" Icann  
notion of a seamless global internet.

So far, the development of IDNs outside Icann has not compromised  
global interconnectivity because they relate to country domains,  
like .cn (China) or jp (Japan), where addresses are allocated at a  
national level based on numbers assigned by Icann.

But in March this year China announced that it was creating Chinese  
language versions not only of cn but also of "top level" domains such  
as .com and .net that are ostensibly the preserve of Icann. Arab  
countries, Israel and Iran also have plans for IDN versions of top- 
level domains.

This has increased pressure on Icann to devolve these addressing  
decisions to regional or local bodies familiar with the language, Mr  
Shaw said.

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/c51879de-e1d9-11da-bf4c-0000779e2340,s01=1.html


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