July 4th, 2007
Foreign-character domain names are coming, ICANN says
By November the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will begin instituting foreign characters in domain addresses, but for now it’s still working on the details, reports the Associated Press.
Currently, addresses can have some foreign letters and are limited to characters: a-z, 0-9 and the hyphen. There are no domains that have exclusively foreign characters, mainly due to the .com issue.
ICANN is conducting tests in various browsers and email applications by planting name servers with nonsensical strings that can be removed quickly should trouble arise.
“We’ve already done the testing in the laboratories,” chairman Vint Cerf said as ICANN’s general meetings ended Friday in San Juan, Puerto Rico. “We’re confident that none of the infrastructure is likely to encounter a problem but you really don’t know until you are in the live environment.”
And then there are the political issues. Officials have to decide on issues such as whether China or a private Taiwanese company should be entitled to the Chinese language version of “.cn”, and other suffix issues.
“I would be doubtful that anything is likely to happen until the first quarter or first half of 2008,” Cerf said.
It is likely that these and other rules will take at least take 18 months to two years to develop, although interim policies can be in place sooner, said Paul Twomey, ICANN’s chief executive.
