Native language domains threaten 'Net

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has announced plans to run a test bed for internationalized domain names this summer. But experts say ICANN's test bed may be too late for the domain name industry, which is under intense pressure from Internet users outside the United States to support native language domain names.

Countries such as China, Egypt, Iran and Saudi Arabia are forging ahead with IDNs without ICANN's approval. These countries are no longer willing to wait for ICANN to develop a standard approach for inserting IDN records into the root zone of the DNS.

IDNs could have a major impact on multinational corporations, which are increasingly dependent on the Internet to market products overseas. If ICANN is not successful at developing a standard approach for IDNs, corporations will have no guarantee that the native language domains they buy will resolve to content they control.

"There is nothing to say that Kraft.com in China has to have anything to do with Kraft Foods or Kraft.com in India," says Rodney Joffe, chairman and CTO of UltraDNS and a member of ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee. "Global multinationals are totally unaware of this possibility."

The issue of IDNs threatens to undermine the Internet itself, which is based on a shared namespace that originates in a single root. Experts fear that ICANN's delay in supporting IDNs could result in a permanent splintering of the DNS, which would create many small networks run by individual countries rather than a single, global Internet.

IDNs are expected to be among the hottest topics at ICANN's next meeting, which occurs this week in Wellington, New Zealand (meetings are held every four months). On Tuesday, members of the Security and Stability Advisory Committee are scheduled to present a report detailing the status of IDNs and the threat of alternative roots.

"ICANN's lack of action with IDNs has created a vacuum that is the prime enabler of countries that are interested in running alternative roots," Joffe says. "Instead of being 12 or 15 countries that talk about running their own root infrastructure, there will probably be 40 to 60 countries talking about it at the New Zealand meeting."

IDNs are an issue because the DNS supports English language ASCII characters while Internet users in other countries want to use domain names with native language character sets and scripts. In 2003 the IETF developed a standard for resolving non-English language characters in the DNS infrastructure, but ICANN has been slow to support that standard.

In its test bed announced March 14, ICANN will include two approaches to inserting IDN records into the root zone of the DNS. One is the IETF standard, which maps non-ASCII characters into ASCII equivalents. The alternative inserts internationalized labels in the root zone.

"We're thrilled to see the ICANN test," says Ram Mohan, vice president of business operations and CTO of Afilias, which operates the .info and .org registries. "It's very good but it's long overdue. . . . If ICANN doesn't move forward, the world isn't waiting."