1

MULTILINGUAL DOMAIN NAMES

Hirofumi Hotta （ JPRS & JPNIC ）

hotta@jprs.jp

APAN2002 Conference in Phuket

January 24, 2002

http:// 日本レジストリサービス .jp

（ INTERNATIONALIZED）

2

non-English characters in e-mail

• Step1– Phonetic mapping in e-mail texts

• Step2– Native language characters in e-mail texts

• Step3– Native language characters in “Subject” fields

• Step4 ?– Native language characters in “To” and “From” field

• Names such as company names and personal names in the social relevant context should be presented in their native language

3

Demands on multilingual domain names

• Rapid growth of the Internet– More non-English speakers are becoming Internet users

• People using non-ASCII characters• Undesirable unification in LDH world

– 博文 , 博史 , 宏史 , …..are all “hirofumi”s in ASCII space– Apostrophe, accents, umlauts, ….. cannot be used in ASCII space

Demand on multilingual domain names

4

History (technology)

• Late 1990s– Developed at the National University of Singapore

• July 1998– Asia Pacific Networking Group

• iDNS Working group : development of the experimental implementation of an Internationalized multilingual multiscript Domain Names Service

• iDomain Working Group : creation of an iDNS testbed in Asia Pacific countries

• 1998-1999– Prototypes demonstrated in international conferences– BoFs held in international conferences

• APRICOT• INET

• Nov. 1999 -– BoF in IETF– IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) Working Group in IETF

5

History (deployment)

• End of 1999– Several companies began commercialization of the mu

ltilingual domain name technology– Several testbeds emerged

• July 2000 - – MINC (Multilingual Domain Names Consortium)

• promotion of the multilingualization of Internet names, including Internet domain names and keywords, the internationalization of Internet names standards and protocols, technical coordination, and liaison with other international bodies

– Country/regional organizations• AINC (Arabic Internet Names Consortium)• CDNC (Chinese Domain Name Consortium )• INFITT (International Forum for IT in Tamil )• JDNA (Japanese Domain Names Association )

6

History (policy)

• March 2001– Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) Working Grou

p in ICANN Board• Fact finding survey concerning technical, policy, and service a

spects• Survey report published in Sept. 2001

– Market demand shown– List of issues elaborated

– GAC (Governmental Advisory Committee) of ICANN• communiqué expressing GAC’s support for multilingual dom

ain names

• Sept. 2001– IDN Committee

• Will recommend solutions of non-technical issues

7

Basic technical requirements

• Preservation of compatibility with current domain names

• Preservation of uniqueness of domain name space

• The Internet must not be divided into islands

Required by IAB (Internet Architecture Board)

8

Character codes of multilingual domain names

• Current : proprietary (local) standard– in PCs– in PDAs– in Internet-enabled phones

• Best current solution may be– UNICODE – Specification of code sets of many languages

• Additional issues– traditional Chinese characters / simplified Chinese ch

aracters• Are they same characters in domain names ?• Is this a local code issue or universal protocol issue ?

9

Client-side vs. Server-side solutions

• Client-side solution– Translation between multilingual script and ASCII-

compatible representation is performed in the user application

– Domain names are processed as ASCII domain names all over the Internet

• Server-side solution– Domain names are sent over the Internet in local

encoding– Applications and services communicate with each

other using non-ASCII domain names all the way

ASCII domain names

multilingual domain names

multilingual domain namesclient-sidesolution

server-sidesolution

user application DNS

(chosen by IETF)

10

How multilingual string is converted to ASCII

original string

normalizedstring

ASCIIstring

Internet(based on ASCII)

unification of the strings considered to be the same

conversion to an ASCII string

NAMEPREP

ACE

ABC カンパニー .JPＡＢＣｶﾝﾊﾟﾆｰ .JPＡ B Ｃカンハ゜ニー .JP

ABC カンパニー .JP

ZQ--GD7UD72C75B2X46RZP6A.JP

ex)

ex)

ex)

11

Issues in using ACE

• Subspace is used by multilingual domain names

• Issues– Reservation of the subspace– Length limitation is severer

• Domain label• Domain name

ASCII Domain Names

ACE-ed Multilingual Domain Names

Multilingual Domain Names

ACE

decode

12

Intellectual Property Rights

• More problems will arise with multilingual domain names– Names in its local language characters means more than

those in ASCII characters

• IPR protection – before registration– Reserved domain names– Sunrise period

• IPR protection – after registration– DRP (Dispute Resolution Polcy)

13

Defining a multilingual top level domain

• Current implementation of multilingual domain names– Second level domain or under

• Allowed by current DNS architecture and technology

– Top level domain• Alternate root• Inclusive root• Pseudo-root

• Above are only to satisfy commercial drive or users’ demands on early deployment of multilingual domain names

• It is important for ICANN to define a multilingual top level domain creation policy

14

Issues in various TLDs• {non-ASCII-string}.{ASCII-ccTLD}• {non-ASCII-string}.{ASCII-gTLD}

– Organizations already being authorized are responsible for the domain name space

• {any-string}.{non-ASCII-ccTLD}– One organization from the relevant country is named to be responsible for the domain

name space– If a country has more than 1 official language,

• What is the language for non-ASCII-ccTLD, or• How many non-ASCII-ccTLDs are given to the country

• {any-string}.{non-ASCII-gTLD}– No one can tell whether top level domain “.企業” is Chinese or Japanese– Difficulty in choosing a responsible organization

• who in what country

15

Other political issues• What are the languages that constitute multilingual domain names

– Some languages have 2 or more kinds of scripts– Traditional Chinese/simplified Chinese

• Who is the language authority for multilingual domain names– Should rules be the same even under different TLDs?

• A single domain name registry should not be the ultimate authority of for the rules• Is such rule definition an international issue?

– Language rules are known to only people using the language• To what extent does the solution need international standard or local coordination?• Each language stakeholders should coordinate among themselves

16

Future Issues

synergydeployment of name servers

with multilingualdomain names

growth of the number of multilingualdomain names and their users

applications with

multilingualdomain name

facilities

policy and coordination of registration and management rules

technology standardization and development

17

Introduction of Japanese Domain Names

• Registration as second level domains– ASCII label– Japanese label

• Japanese domain names, consisting of Chinese and Kana characters as well as ASCII characters, can be registered– Up to 15 characters

• Japanese domain names are registered only as general-use JP domain names.

日本レジストリサービス日本レジストリサービス .JP.JP

Top level domainSecond level domain

18

Categories of Reserved Japanese Domain Names

• Prefectures; large cities designated by ordinance; prefectural capital cities• Single characters in Hiragana, Katakana, numbers written in Chinese cha

racters, prolonged sound symbols, and others.– あ、イ、五、ー、…

• Names of primary and secondary educational organizations (primary schools, junior high schools, etc.)– Names ending with “ 小学校 (primary school),” “ 中学校 (junior high school)” and

“ 高等学校 (high school).”

• Names of international inter-governmental organizations (such as the United Nations)

• Names related to administrative, judicial, and legislative agencies• Japanese common nouns

– Ex) service, station, sightseeing, . . . (that may appear in yellow pages)

• Names required for JPNIC operations– ジェイピーニック、ドメイン名、日本語ドメイン名、…

19

Phased introduction

• Priority registration– 22/Feb/2001 - 23/Mar/2001– Trademarks, registered names, university names, personal

names in full– In case of competition, registrants were determined by draw

• Concurrent registration– 02/Apr/2001 - 23/Apr/2001– All applications which arrived in this period were regarded as

arrived at the same time, not in the order received– In case of competition, registrants were determined by draw

• First-come-first-served basis registration– 07/May/2001 -

20

Results of Priority Registration

• Priority Registration Applications

Trademarks

Registered names

Personal names

academic

Total number of applications

8,300

0

200

0

11,900

12,400

600

400

20,100

12,400

800

400

ASCII Japanese TotalCategory

8,500 25,400 33,800Number of domainnames registered 6,500 22,600 29,100

21

Results of Concurrent Registration

Multiple applications

Single applications

Total

Multiple applications

32,500

22,600

55,100

4,600

41,700

23,400

65,200

5,200

74,200

46,000

120,300

9,800

ASCII Japanese TotalCategory

Single applications 22,600 23,400 46,000

Total 27,200 28,600 55,800

Number of domain names

Number of applications

# of domain names as of 1/Dec/2001Traditional 283,300 ASCII -General use 122,000 ASCII 61,500 Japanese

22

Technologies in Japanese JP domain names

• NAMEPREP+RACE (AMC-ACE-Z in May)

• mDNkit (open source)– Software library for applications

– Software tool for nameserver software upgrade

• Applications– DNS Proxy

– mDN wrapper (which intercepts communications and converts domain names)

– IE + RealNames

– Users can develop applications using mDNkit

23

Japanese Domain Names Association• Activities

– Information exchange– Standardization of usage– Development of a tool kit– Support for development and testing

• Members– ISPs– Application/Hardware vendors– Domain name registries/registrars– Universities

• Working Groups– Interface specification– Web– Mail– VoIP

jdna.jp日本語ドメイン名協会 .jp