ISPCP Constituency

ISPCP Activity on Internationalization of Domain Names

Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) are domain names represented by local language characters. Such domain names could contain letters or characters from non-ASCII scripts (for example, Arabic or Chinese). Many efforts are ongoing in the Internet community to make domain names available in character sets other than ASCII. These "internationalized domain name" (IDN) efforts were the subject of a 25 September 2000 resolution by the ICANN Board of Directors, which recognized "that it is important that the Internet evolve to be more accessible to those who do not use the ASCII character set," and also stressed that "the internationalization of the Internet's domain name system must be accomplished through standards that are open, non-proprietary, and fully compatible with the Internet's existing end-to-end model and that preserve globally unique naming in a universally resolvable public name space."

The ISPCP Constituency is working on both technical and policy fronts to help adoption and implementation of IDNs.  In particular, several members of the ISPCP are working on the gNSO Work Group devoted to IDNs.  ICANN staff keep a detailed policy and technology page available on IDNs.

Mark McFadden's notes from the Marrakech IDN workshop are available online.