ICANN Successfully Conducts Laboratory Tests of Internationalised Domain Names
In October, 2006, ICANN engaged Autonomica AB of Stockholm, Sweden, to develop, conduct, and report on the results of laboratory testing of internationalized top-level domains in a setting corresponding to the public root. Quoting from their report, Just Posted this morning: Autonomica AB has, under a contract with ICANN, investigated whether the addition of top level domains containing encoded internationalized characters (so called IDNs) would have any impact on the operations of the root name servers providing delegations, or the iterative mode resolvers used to look up the information. No impact at all could be detected. All involved systems behaved exactly as expected. Internationalized domain names (IDNs) are domain names containing characters other than those based on the ASCII character sets. Such non-ASCII characters include those available in right-to-left scripts (e.g., Arabic) and non-alphabetic scripts (e.g., Mandarin Chinese). ICANN is actively involved in the efforts to make these available at the top level—that is, so that an entire domain name can be rendered in local characters. The global deployment of IDNs will enhance the local Internet experience in large regions of the world by enabling people to share and access information or use services offered in their own languages. The laboratory technical test is one of the prerequisites to eventual insert internationalized top level labels in the root zone. This test is intended to determine the viability of internationalized top-level names and the effect they may have on the DNS. The work was done by replicating the root server environment. The test intentionally did not incorporate the end-user perspective or a live root test. Autonomica reported successful insertion using two major server implementations used by most root server operators: BIND and NSD. The test design was finalized in December of 2006 following a public comment period. The test procedure was published so that others can replicate the test. Details of the test setup and design can be found here. Details of the test result can be found here. [PDF, 73K] For any questions or request for additional details of the test design and result please contact Tina Dam at tina.dam@icann.org For further information around ICANN’s IDN Program please visit http://www.icann.org/topics/idn/ -- Regards, Nick Ashton-Hart Director, At-Large ICANN PO Box 32160 London N4 2XY United Kingdom Main Tel: +44 (20) 8800-1011] USA Tel: +1 (202) 657-5460 Fax: +44 (20) 7681-3135 mobile: +44 (7774) 932798 email: nick.ashton-hart@icann.org Win IM: ashtonhart@hotmail.com / AIM/iSight: nashtonhart@mac.com / Skype: nashtonhart Online Bio: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashtonhart
Regarding ICANN's IDN tests... I am not an expert on IDN, so I am forced to rely on expert commentary. The following two comments appeared on the CPSR Governance list. I would appreciate it if any other IDN specialists could weigh in on the topic. Stephane Bortzmeyer: Since a Punycode name is a regular domain name, there was nothing to test and the authors of the different documents have some merit to be able to produce even these few pages. A lot of ICANN's money spent on that. Autonomica can thank them. (Of course, ICANN's primary motive was probably more to procrastinate about IDN.) Subbiah: I can't believe I am actually agreeing with Stephane on this one, (1) IDN as used today, was originally conceived by the Singapore team back in 1997/8 precisely so that the labels on the wire will all be effectively in ascii. Therefore by design they were not expected to cause any problems inherent in the non-English script themselves. That was the whole point. So its no surprise it works. While not in my mind totally useless as Stephane states, the current tests would never (:-)) have failed. (2) The ICANN test just announced was not in the full root but rather a lab-like, more limited environment. Similar tests were successfully conducted back in the year-long Asian testbed in 1998/9 by APNG. (3) As for a real-life test in large numbers on a large fraction of net users, while ICANN prepares to do one, a very close cousin has been ongoing in real commercial-life for 3 or more years in China involving over a 100M end-users and many tens of thousands of issued names, in the case of the Chinese script (which is about different as a script as you can imagine from ASCII, not that it matters from a puny code point of view). Similar efforts in other scripts but in smaller size are also ongoing for a number of years in a number of other countries/scripts, for example the Arab League sponsored (22 Arabic country Arabic script effort) with the participation of the monopoly national ISPs of several Arabic countries. ____________________________________________________________________________________ It's here! Your new message! Get new email alerts with the free Yahoo! Toolbar. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/toolbar/features/mail/
Stephane Bortzmeyer: Since a Punycode name is a regular domain name, there was nothing to test and the authors of the different documents have some merit to be able to produce even these few pages. A lot of ICANN's money spent on that. Autonomica can thank them. (Of course, ICANN's primary motive was probably more to procrastinate about IDN.)
(2) The ICANN test just announced was not in the full root but rather a lab-like, more limited environment.
(3) As for a real-life test in large numbers on a large fraction of net users, [ China and the Arabic world have been using IDNs for years ]
This is all correct. As I just noted, all this verified is that a few widely used DNS servers and clients do not deliberately break IDNs. But nobody thought they did. The hard problem with IDNs is political, what the rules are to prevent registrations of two names that appear "too similar" for whatever definition of similar you'd like to use. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://johnlevine.com, Mayor "I dropped the toothpaste", said Tom, crestfallenly.
participants (3)
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Danny Younger -
John L -
Nick Ashton-Hart