Multilingual top-level domains are far off, ICANN says

December 16th, 2002
By Joris Evers

Second-level domain names in Chinese, Japanese or Korean will be abundant by late 2003, but a version of ".com" or ".museum" in any of those languages is a long way off, an executive of the group that oversees the Internet naming system said Sunday.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) wants to see how multilingual second-level domains work before it starts work on the top-level domain (TLD) space, Masanobu Katoh, chairman of ICANN's Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) committee and a member of the ICANN board of directors said in an interview.

A second-level domain is the name that comes before the ".com." In "sony.com," for example, Sony is the second level and ".com" is the top level.

ICANN's board voted to extend the life of the IDN committee until the end of 2004 on Sunday here at the organizations annual meeting. Also, the committee will get extra help for its work on multilingual domains from technical specialists as well as linguists. Originally, the IDN committee was set to end its work this year.

"It is probably optimistic to say that we will finish by 2004," said Katoh.

ICANN, based in Marina del Rey, Calif., has to look at the technical aspects of the implementation, but also issues such as dispute resolution, said Katoh, who predicts Japanese, Chinese and Korean second-level domain names to boom in 2003. Arabic and Cyrillic names won't be available for a while, he said.

The IDN working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a standards-setting body, late October released a first mechanism for handling internationalized domain names in a standard fashion. The IETF group is also represented in ICANN's IDN committee.

The Internet's Domain Name System (DNS) was designed to support about 30 English-language ASCII characters. International domain names, however, draw from the 96,000-character Unicode repertoire. Domain names in other languages must be encoded in ASCII for transmission across the DNS or they won't work. IETF came up with a mechanism called IDNA to handle this.

IDNA allows the non-ASCII characters to be represented using only the ASCII characters. This backward-compatibility allows IDNs to be introduced with no changes to the DNS infrastructure.

About 1 million non-English language domain names have already been sold, some in the industry say. Users need special software to resolve those and E-mail to a multilingual domain is not possible, according to the VeriSign Inc. Web site. VeriSign already sells domain names in Japanese, Korean and Chinese characters.

Mountain View, Calif.-based VeriSign earlier this month even announced a deal with the national domain name registries in Japan and South Korea to support the registration and use of Japanese and Korean domain names. The registries will also distribute VeriSign's i-Nav plug-in software.