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Domain Names Complicated by Non-English Character Sets
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 8 November 2000
Washington, DC -- The Internet Society strongly urges caution in the execution of activity regarding the use of non-English character sets for the registration of domain names. The Society further urges all parties to allow the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working group on internationalized domain names to complete its work, before allowing the public to register such names.
There is currently a commercial "testbed" initiative for certain registrars to register domain names in non-English character sets in the .com, .net and .org top level domains. One of the features of the "testbed" is a provision for registration in three Asian languages, Korean, Japanese and Chinese (traditional and simplified).
Despite the good intentions of opening the domain name system to a wider international base of users, the "testbed" has been criticized by officials of the Peoples Republic of China. A recent news article, published on the Internet by ICB Toll Free News on October 27, 2000 http://www.icbtollfree.com, reports that the "testbed" activity is viewed quite negatively in China.
Regarding the initiation of the commercial "testbed" activity, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) issued a statement on the subject. While not objecting to the "testbed," ICANN strongly supported the IETF working group. ICANN emphasized the principle:
"A fundamental requirement in this work is to not disturb the current use and operation of the domain name system, and for the DNS to continue to allow any system anywhere to resolve any domain name."
ISOC believes the commercial "testbed" is premature under the technical standards of the Internet. The IETF will in due course issue a Proposed Standard for internationalized domain names. One of the purposes of a Proposed Standard is to accumulate community experience with a specification that has been agreed upon by the Internet community. Testbeds and interoperability tests are very useful at that stage, because they are evaluating different implementations of the same standard, not different approaches, and because the specification is considered firm.
In general, testbeds or interoperability tests before something is nearly at Proposed Standard (or firm enough to be published as an Experimental RFC) tend to be a waste of resources or confusing to the standards process.
Early implementations which are exposed to the Internet community may be very helpful in evaluating different models and approaches that might evolve into standards and may be a useful complement to the "design team" process employed by the IETF. But the principal purpose of such implementations should be to develop and evaluate an approach, not to be a "testbed" or "interoperability test" -- on the latter basis, there is little to test.
While the IETF cannot prevent implementers pursuing other goals (and would not attempt to do so), testbeds that are intended to aid and support the IETF process should
- Include clear criteria for success or failure
- Should be initiated only when there is an agreed-upon stable specification (usually a Proposed Standard or Experimental RFC, as discussed above), or at least only after a clear consensus decision from the relevant IETF Working Group or Area.
- Contain clear provisions for preventing end users and the systems on which they are dependent from becoming locked into the technology being developed/tested. Ideally, these provisions should be technical (e.g., cutoff dates or changes in ports or naming conventions) as well as procedural (e.g., explicit warnings to users about possible changes).
- A test should never result in a name being publicly available or assigned in a permanent sense. RACE-encoded names might appear in the testbed for test purposes, but should not be made available as DNS names usable in the global domain name system until the encoding of multilingual names is agreed on.
Further, a true testbed should not be a mechanism to sway or control Working Group decisions and actions.
Before positions on this complex issue become entrenched, and, more importantly, before users of the Internet establish claims of ownership of particular domain names, it is now time for a hiatus in the commercial deployment of internationalized character sets in the operational DNS.
About the Internet Society
The Internet Society http://www.isoc.org/ is a non-profit, non-governmental, open membership organization whose worldwide individual and organization members make up a veritable "who's who" of the Internet industry. It provides leadership in technical and operational standards, policy issues, and education. ISOC hosts two annual Internet conferences http://www.isoc.org/isoc/conferences/, trains people from all over the world in networking technologies, conducts workshops for educators, and publishes an award-winning magazine, OnTheInternet.
ISOC provides an international forum to address the most important economic, political, social, ethical and legal initiatives influencing the evolution of the Internet. This includes facilitating discussions on key policy decisions such as taxation, copyright protection, privacy and confidentiality, and initiatives towards self-governance of the Internet. ISOC created the Internet Societal Task Force as an on-going forum for discussion, debate, and development of position papers, white papers, and statements on Internet related societal issues.
ISOC is the organizational home of the International Engineering Task Force, the Internet Architecture Board, the Internet Engineering Steering Group, and the Internet Research Task Force - the standards setting and research arms of the Internet community. These organizations operate in an environment of bottom-up consensus building made possible through the participation of thousands of people from throughout the world.
Contact:
David Maher
Vice President, Public Policy
Internet Society
Tel: +1 312 876 8055
Fax: +1 312 876 7934
Email: dwmaher@attglobal.netDon Heath
President and CEO
Internet Society
11150 Sunset Hills Road
Suite 100
Reston, VA 20190-5108
USA
Tel: +1 703 326 9880
Fax: +1 703 326 9881
Email: heath@isoc.orgLynn St. Amour
Executive Director and COO
Internet Society
4, rue des Falaises
CH-1205 Geneva
Switzerland
Tel: +41 22 807 1444
Fax: +41 22 807 1445
Email: st.amour@isoc.org
