IDNs in Norway wwTLD-meeting 26.03.2003 Hilde Thunem

1. IDNs in Norway wwTLD-meeting 26.03.2003 Hilde Thunem

2. What is happening in Norway? • Two main areas : Technical (how do we make IDNs work?) and policy (rules for IDNs) • Technical: • We will be following the IETF standard • Policy: • A proposal is currently out for public comment by the Norwegian Internet community

3. Policy: Internationalization has its costs • DNS: IETF standard handles all non a-z characters equally • Technical consequences outside DNS • Billing systems • Whois • Customer databases • Administrative consequences • User support both at the registry and at the registrar • ADRP – must handle all scripts that are allowed under the TLD

4. Policy: Internationalization has its costs • Legal consequences • A larger namespace – new opportunities for domain name pirates • Characters that look the same • ВЕНЕМОТН [Cyrillic] • BEHEMOTH [Latin, Helvetica] • BEHEMOTH [Latin, Times, italics, red] • Final important point: • IDNs will be used locally, for the local users of a language. Users without the relevant characters on the keyboard will probably hesitate to enter a IDN given them on a business card. Domain name holders that want to reach a global community will therefore probably still use a-z domains

5. Policy proposal on limiting the characters under .no • Only characters in written languages that has official status as Norwegian languages • The letters a-z, numbers 0-9 and - • The special Norwegian characters æøå • In addition: • Bokmål and nynorsk (Norwegian language council) • à, ç, è, é, ê, ñ, ò, ó, ô, ü, ä • Sámi (Sámi council) • Northern Sámi: á, č, đ, ŋ, š, ŧ, ž • Southern Sámi: none • Lule Sámi: á and ń • Personal names (The Norwegian register of names) • ä, é, è, ô, ö and ü • Whether to use language variant tables will be considered after the Local Internet community has given its input on which languages that will be allowed

6. Transition mechanism • Three choices: • The big bang • Open at a given time, first come first served • Draw lots • Accept applications over a period, and then randomly determine the order they are treated in • Give special rights to some • Based on prior trademark rights, prior domain name registrations etc.

7. Policy proposal on transition for .no: Draw lots • Equal chances for everyone • No special rights for holders of prior registrations. Today’s policy explicitly states that registering a domain name does not give the holder any new rights that he did not already have • Procedural strengths: • The registry may return wrong applications, and if there is still time the registrar can correct them and send them in again before the drawing commences • Duplicate applications are eliminated, so that applicants need not go to lots of different registrars and fill up their capacity • More robust for temporary technical problems at the registry or registrars • It worked once… (at the liberalization of .no)

8. More information • Norid’s proposal: • www.norid.no/regelverk/forslag/idn-2003/ • Only in Norwegian, but English translation coming soon at www.norid.no/regelverk/forslag/idn-2003/index.en.html • Hilde.Thunem@uninett.no • www.norid.no/