IDNs in Norway ccTLD-meeting in Rome 2004 Hilde Thunem

2 Domain name policy – IDNs under.no Only characters in written languages that has official status as Norwegian languages allowed  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 No bundles – it was felt that for Norwegian languages this would create more rather than less confusion  Accents are used to change the meaning of certain words  IP-rights: Møller and Möller are not the same

3 Transition mechanism for.no: Draw lots No sunrise, and no special rights for holders of prior registrations  According to the domain name policy, registering a domain name does not give the holder any new rights that he did not already have Equal chances for everyone 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)

4 The transition Friday february 6th, 4 pm the registration system is closed in preparation for the transition to a new policy. Monday february 9th, 10 am the transition is started. Applications for internationalized domain names are received, checked and put in a lottery que, while ordinary applications are processed as normal. Friday february 13th, 4 pm the registry closes the reception of all applications. Duplicates, where the same organizaton applied for the same name, are removed. Monday february 16th the Norwegian Post- and telecommunication Authority arranges a lottery where the order of the applications is randomly decided for the cases where more than one applicant has applied for a domain. The registry then processes the applications according to the order decided by the lottery. Wednesday february 18th, 10 am the registry system is opened for applications under the new domain name policy. All applications are processed on a first come first served basis.

5 Applications received during the transition week

6 Statistics and trends domain name applications received during the transition week  of these do not participate in the lottery (some because the application is for an ASCII domain name, the majority because they contains errors)  983 duplicates applications participate in the lottery 5083 domain names applied for, 3383 (67%) of these have only one applicant Very few domain names in the Sami languages registered – and only with a limited set of the characters actually used (so far) Most of the domain names with more than one applicant are generic, where there is no trademark rights or other rights A few disputes has shown up after the transition (as expected) but the alternative dispute resolution body are treating these

7 Living with IDNs The.no domain name policy state that there are two versions of a domain name, an ACE-version (which is what will be entered in DNS) and a domain version. Both versions of the name must fulfil all requirements in the policy  Maximum and minimum length of name  Entered on the contract with the registrant (along with the registrant statement that he does not infringe on other peoples rights) Whois:  Web-interface shows both versions  Command line interface sends Latin-1 as default, but will send UTF8 if asked for The registry prints both versions on invoices

8 Living with IDNs Registry customer support does not speak the Sami languages, but as all Sami also speaks Norwegian this will probably not be a problem. In addition the website lists the characters along with their names, as a help when spelling something over telephone ”But it does not work....” No matter how much information you have given the registrants in beforehand you have to be prepared to deal with this question

9 More information The Norwegian IDN policy 