IDNs in Norway wwTLD-meeting 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:   Only in Norwegian, but English translation coming soon at /index.en.html /index.en.html