An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

domain name A domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control within the Internet. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services and more. As ...

that contains at least one label displayed in software applications, in whole or in part, in non-latin script or

alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syll ...

, such as

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic languages, Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C ...

Bengali Bengali or Bengalee, or Bengalese may refer to: *something of, from, or related to Bengal, a large region in South Asia * Bengalis, an ethnic and linguistic group of the region * Bengali language, the language they speak ** Bengali alphabet, the w ...

Chinese Chinese can refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation ** List of ethnic groups in China, people of ...

(

Mandarin Mandarin or The Mandarin may refer to: Language * Mandarin Chinese, branch of Chinese originally spoken in northern parts of the country ** Standard Chinese or Modern Standard Mandarin, the official language of China ** Taiwanese Mandarin, Stand ...

, simplified or

traditional A tradition is a belief or behavior (folk custom) passed down within a group or society with symbolic meaning or special significance with origins in the past. A component of cultural expressions and folklore, common examples include holidays or ...

Cyrillic , bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця , fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs , fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic , fam3 = Phoenician , fam4 = G ...

(including

Bulgarian Bulgarian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to the country of Bulgaria * Bulgarians, a South Slavic ethnic group * Bulgarian language, a Slavic language * Bulgarian alphabet * A citizen of Bulgaria, see Demographics of Bulgaria * Bul ...

Russian Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including: *Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...

, Serbian and

Ukrainian Ukrainian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Ukraine * Something relating to Ukrainians, an East Slavic people from Eastern Europe * Something relating to demographics of Ukraine in terms of demography and population of Ukraine * So ...

Devanagari Devanagari ( ; , , Sanskrit pronunciation: ), also called Nagari (),Kathleen Kuiper (2010), The Culture of India, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, , page 83 is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental Writing systems#Segmental syste ...

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...

Hindi Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been de ...

Tamil Tamil may refer to: * Tamils, an ethnic group native to India and some other parts of Asia **Sri Lankan Tamils, Tamil people native to Sri Lanka also called ilankai tamils **Tamil Malaysians, Tamil people native to Malaysia * Tamil language, nativ ...

Thai Thai or THAI may refer to: * Of or from Thailand, a country in Southeast Asia ** Thai people, the dominant ethnic group of Thailand ** Thai language, a Tai-Kadai language spoken mainly in and around Thailand *** Thai script *** Thai (Unicode block ...

or in the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...

-based characters with

diacritics A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacritic ...

or ligatures, such as French,

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) ** Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ge ...

Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance language *** Regional Ita ...

Polish Polish may refer to: * Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe * Polish language * Poles Poles,, ; singular masculine: ''Polak'', singular feminine: ''Polka'' or Polish people, are a West Slavic nation and ethnic group, w ...

Portuguese Portuguese may refer to: * anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal ** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods ** Portuguese language, a Romance language *** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language ** Portu ...

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Can ...

. These

writing system A writing system is a method of visually representing verbal communication, based on a script and a set of rules regulating its use. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a reliable form ...

s are encoded by computers in multibyte

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...

. Internationalized domain names are stored in the

Domain Name System The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed naming system for computers, services, and other resources in the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information with domain names assigned t ...

(DNS) as

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because of ...

strings using

Punycode Punycode is a representation of Unicode with the limited ASCII character subset used for Internet hostnames. Using Punycode, host names containing Unicode characters are transcoded to a subset of ASCII consisting of letters, digits, and hyphens, wh ...

transcription. The DNS, which performs a lookup service to translate mostly user-friendly names into network addresses for locating Internet resources, is restricted in practice to the use of ASCII characters, a practical limitation that initially set the standard for acceptable domain names. The internationalization of domain names is a technical solution to translate names written in language-native scripts into an

ASCII text ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because of ...

representation that is compatible with the DNS. Internationalized domain names can only be used with applications that are specifically designed for such use; they require no changes in the infrastructure of the Internet. IDN was originally proposed in December 1987 by Martin Dürst and implemented in 1990 by Tan Juay Kwang and Leong Kok Yong under the guidance of Tan Tin Wee. After much debate and many competing proposals, a system called ''Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications'' (IDNA) was adopted as a standard, and has been implemented in several

top-level domain A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet after the root domain. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in ...

s. In IDNA, the term ''internationalized domain name'' means specifically any domain name consisting only of labels to which the IDNA ToASCII

algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specificat ...

(see below) can be successfully applied. In March 2008, the

IETF The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements and a ...

formed a new IDN working group to update the current IDNA protocol. In April 2008, UN-ESCWA together with the

Public Interest Registry Public Interest Registry is a not-for-profit based in Reston, Virginia, created by the Internet Society in 2002 to manage the .ORG top-level domain. It took over operation of .ORG in January 2003 and launched the .NGO and .ONG top-level domains in ...

(PIR) and

Afilias Afilias, Inc. is a US corporation that is the registry operator of the .info, .mobi and .pro top-level domain, service provider for registry operators of .org, .ngo, .lgbt, .asia, .aero, and a provider of domain name registry services for countri ...

launched the Arabic Script in IDNs Working Group (ASIWG), which comprised experts in DNS,

ccTLD A country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country, sovereign state, or dependent territory identified with a country code. All ASCII ccTLD identifiers are two letters long, and all ...

operators, business, academia, as well as members of regional and international organizations. Operated by Afilias's Ram Mohan, ASIWG aims to develop a unified IDN table for the

Arabic script The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used writing system in the world by number of countries using it or a script directly derived from it, and the ...

, and constituted an example of community collaboration that helps local and regional expertise engage in global policy development as well as technical standardization. In October 2009, the

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN ) is an American multistakeholder group and nonprofit organization responsible for coordinating the maintenance and procedures of several databases related to the namespaces ...

(ICANN) approved the creation of

internationalized country code top-level domain An internationalized country code top-level domain is a top-level domain in the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. IDN ccTLDs are specially encoded domain names that are displayed in an end user application, such as a web browser, in the ...

s (IDN ccTLDs) in the Internet that use the IDNA standard for native language scripts. In May 2010, the first IDN ccTLDs were installed in the

DNS root zone The DNS root zone is the top-level DNS zone in the hierarchical namespace of the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. Before October 1, 2016, the root zone had been overseen by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN ...

Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications

Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) is a mechanism defined in 2003 for handling internationalized domain names containing non-

characters. Although the

supports non-ASCII characters, applications such as

e-mail Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic (digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...

and

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

s restrict the characters which can be used as domain names for purposes such as a

hostname In computer networking, a hostname (archaically nodename) is a label that is assigned to a device connected to a computer network and that is used to identify the device in various forms of electronic communication, such as the World Wide Web. Hos ...

. Strictly speaking, it is the network protocols these applications use that have restrictions on the characters which can be used in domain names, not the applications that have these limitations or the DNS itself. To retain backward compatibility with the installed base, the IETF IDNA Working Group decided that internationalized domain names should be converted to a suitable ASCII-based form that could be handled by web browsers and other user applications. IDNA specifies how this conversion between names written in non-ASCII characters and their ASCII-based representation is performed. An IDNA-enabled application is able to convert between the internationalized and

representations of a domain name. It uses the ASCII form for DNS lookups but can present the internationalized form to users who presumably prefer to read and write domain names in non-ASCII scripts such as Arabic or Hiragana. Applications that do not support IDNA will not be able to handle domain names with non-ASCII characters, but will still be able to access such domains if given the (usually rather cryptic) ASCII equivalent. ICANN issued guidelines for the use of IDNA in June 2003, and it was already possible to register

.jp The web address suffix .jp is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Japan. It was established in 1986 and is administered by the Japan Registry Services. History At the establishment of the .jp domain, the domain was administe ...

domains using this system in July 2003 and

.info The domain name info is a generic top-level domain (gTLD) in the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. The name is derived from ''information'', although registration requirements do not prescribe any particular purpose. The TLD ''info'' wa ...

domains in March 2004. Several other top-level domain registries started accepting registrations in 2004 and 2005. IDN Guidelines were first created in June 2003, and have been updated to respond to

phishing Phishing is a type of social engineering where an attacker sends a fraudulent (e.g., spoofed, fake, or otherwise deceptive) message designed to trick a person into revealing sensitive information to the attacker or to deploy malicious softwa ...

concerns in November 2005. An ICANN working group focused on country-code domain names at the top level was formed in November 2007 and promoted jointly by the country code supporting organization and the Governmental Advisory Committee. Additionally, ICANN supports the community-led Universal Acceptance Steering Group, which seeks to promote the usability of IDNs and other new gTLDS in all applications, devices and systems.

Mozilla Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, w ...

1.4,

Netscape Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was onc ...

7.1, and

Opera Opera is a form of theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a librett ...

7.11 were among the first applications to support IDNA. A browser plugin is available for Internet Explorer 6 to provide IDN support. Internet Explorer 7.0 and

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

's URL APIs provide native support for IDN.

ToASCII and ToUnicode

The conversions between ASCII and non-ASCII forms of a domain name are accomplished by a pair of algorithms called ToASCII and ToUnicode. These algorithms are not applied to the domain name as a whole, but rather to individual labels. For example, if the domain name is www.example.com, then the labels are ''www'', ''example'', and ''com''. ToASCII or ToUnicode are applied to each of these three separately. The details of these two algorithms are complex. They are specified in RFC 3490. Following is an overview of their workings. ToASCII leaves ASCII labels unchanged. It fails if the label is unsuitable for the Domain Name System. For labels containing at least one non-ASCII character, ToASCII applies the

Nameprep Nameprep is the process of case-folding a string to lowercase and removal of some generally invisible code points before it is suitable to represent a domain name, or other such canonical name. It is used by the Internationalizing Domain Names i ...

algorithm. This converts the label to lowercase and performs other normalization. ToASCII then translates the result to ASCII, using

.RFC 3492, ''Punycode: A Bootstring encoding of Unicode for Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA)'', A. Costello, The Internet Society (March 2003) Finally, it prepends the four-character string "xn--". This four-character string is called the ASCII Compatible Encoding (''ACE'') prefix. It is used to distinguish labels encoded in Punycode from ordinary ASCII labels. The ToASCII algorithm can fail in several ways. For example, the final string could exceed the 63-character limit of a DNS label. A label for which ToASCII fails cannot be used in an internationalized domain name. The function ToUnicode reverses the action of ToASCII, stripping off the ACE prefix and applying the Punycode decode algorithm. It does not reverse the Nameprep processing, since that is merely a normalization and is by nature irreversible. Unlike ToASCII, ToUnicode always succeeds, because it simply returns the original string if decoding fails. In particular, this means that ToUnicode has no effect on a string that does not begin with the ACE prefix.

Example of IDNA encoding

IDNA encoding may be illustrated using the example domain Bücher.example. (german: Bücher, lit=books.) This domain name has two labels, ''Bücher'' and ''example''. The second label is pure ASCII, and is left unchanged. The first label is processed by Nameprep to give bücher, and then converted to

to result in bcher-kva. It is then prefixed with xn-- to produce xn--bcher-kva. The resulting name suitable for use in DNS records and queries is therefore xn--bcher-kva.example.

Arabic Script IDN Working Group (ASIWG)

While the Arab region represents 5 percent of the world's population, it accounts for a mere 2.6 percent of global Internet usage. Moreover, the percentage of Internet users among the population in the

Arab world The Arab world ( ar, اَلْعَالَمُ الْعَرَبِيُّ '), formally the Arab homeland ( '), also known as the Arab nation ( '), the Arabsphere, or the Arab states, refers to a vast group of countries, mainly located in Western A ...

is a low of 11 percent, compared to the global rate of 21.9 percent. However, Internet usage in the region has grown by 1,426 percent between the years 2000 and 2008, which represents a large increase, particularly compared to the average world growth rate of 305.5 percent over the same period. It is reasonable to infer, therefore, that the usage growth could have been even more significant if DNS was available in Arabic characters. The introduction of IDNs offers many potential new opportunities and benefits for Arab Internet users by allowing them to establish domains in their native languages and alphabets, and to create a whole range of services and localized applications on top of those domains.

Top-level domain implementation

In 2009, ICANN decided to implement a new class of top-level domains, assignable to countries and independent regions, similar to the rules for

country code top-level domains A country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country, sovereign state, or dependent territory identified with a country code. All ASCII ccTLD identifiers are two letters long, and all ...

. However, the domain names may be any desirable string of characters, symbols, or glyphs in the language-specific, non-Latin alphabet or script of the applicant's language, within certain guidelines to assure sufficient visual uniqueness. The process of installing IDN country code domains began with a long period of testing in a set of subdomains in the test top-level domain. Eleven domains used language-native scripts or alphabets, such as "δοκιμή", meaning ''test'' in

. These efforts culminated in the creation of the first

s (IDN ccTLDs) for production use in 2010. In the Domain Name System, these domains use an

representation consisting of the prefix "xn--" followed by the

translation of the

representation of the language-specific alphabet or script glyphs. For example, the

name of Russia's IDN ccTLD is "рф". In Punycode representation, this is "p1ai", and its DNS name is "xn--p1ai".

Non-IDNA or non-ICANN registries that support non-ASCII domain names

There are other registries that support non-ASCII domain names. The company ThaiURL.com in Thailand supports ".com" registrations via its own IDN encoding, ThaiURL. However, since most modern browsers only recognize IDNA/Punycode IDNs, ThaiURL-encoded domains must be typed in or linked to in their encoded form, and they will be displayed thus in the address bar. This limits their usefulness; however, they are still valid and universally accessible domains. Several registries support Punycode

emoji An emoji ( ; plural emoji or emojis) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed conversat ...

characters as

emoji domain An emoji domain is a domain name with one or more emoji in it, for example 😉.. Function With the exception of the information emoji (), the trademark emoji () and the "m" emoji (), for an emoji to work as a domain name, it must be conver ...

ASCII spoofing concerns

The use of Unicode in domain names makes it potentially easier to

spoof Spoof, spoofs, spoofer, or spoofing may refer to: * Forgery of goods or documents * Semen, in Australian slang * Spoof (game), a guessing game * Spoofing (finance), a disruptive algorithmic-trading tactic designed to manipulate markets __NOTOC__ ...

web sites as the visual representation of an IDN string in a web browser may make a spoof site appear indistinguishable from the legitimate site being spoofed, depending on the font used. For example, Unicode character U+0430, Cyrillic small letter a, can look identical to Unicode character U+0061, Latin small letter a, used in English. As a concrete example, using

Cyrillic letters , bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця , fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs , fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic , fam3 = Phoenician , fam4 = G ...

а, е ("Ie"/"Ye", U+0435, looking essentially identical to Latin letters a, e), Belarusian-Ukrainian і (U+0456, essentially identical to Latin letter i), р ("Er", U+0440, essentially identical to Latin letter p), the URL wіkіреdіа.org is formed , which is virtually indistinguishable from the visual representation of the legitimate wikipedia.org (possibly depending on fonts).

Top-level domains accepting IDN registration

Many top-level domains have started to accept internationalized domain name registrations at the second or lower levels. Afilias (.INFO) offered the first gTLD IDN second-level registrations in 2004 in the German language. DotAsia, the registrar for the TLD

Asia Asia (, ) is one of the world's most notable geographical regions, which is either considered a continent in its own right or a subcontinent of Eurasia, which shares the continental landmass of Afro-Eurasia with Africa. Asia covers an area ...

, conducted a 70-day sunrise period starting May 11, 2011 for second-level domain registrations in the Chinese, Japanese and Korean scripts.Dot-Asia releases IDN dates
Managing Internet IP, April 14, 2011.

Timeline

* 1996-12: Martin Dürst's original Internet Draft proposing UTF5 (the first example of what is known today as an ASCII-compatible encoding (ACE)) – UTF-5 was first defined at the University of Zürich * 1998-03: Early Research on IDN at National University of Singapore (NUS), Center for Internet Research (formerly Internet Research and Development Unit – IRDU) led by Tan Tin Wee (T. W. Tan) (IDN Project team – Tan Juay Kwang and Leong Kok Yong) and subsequently continued under a team at Bioinformatrix Pte. Ltd. (BIX Pte. Ltd.) – an NUS spin-off company led by S. Subbiah. * 1998-06: Korean Language Domain Name System is developed by Kang, Hee-Seung at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) * 1998-07: Geneva INET'98 conference with a BoF discussion on iDNS and APNG General Meeting and Working Group meeting. * 1998-07: Asia Pacific Networking Group (APNG, now still in existence and distinct from a gathering known as APSTAR) iDNS Working Group formed. * 1998-10:

James Seng Seng Ching Hong (commonly referred to as James Seng) () is one of the Internet pioneers in Singapore and is recognized as an international expert in the Internet arena. He gave regular speeches at various forums on several Internet issues such as ...

, a former student of Tan Tin Wee at Sheares Hall, NUS, and student researcher at Technet and IRDU, Computer Center, NUS, was recruited by CEO S. Subbiah to lead further IDN development at BIX Pte. Ltd. * 1999-02: iDNS Testbed launched by BIX Pte. Ltd. under the auspices of APNG with participation from

CNNIC The China Internet Network Information Center (), or CNNIC, is the administrative agency responsible for domain registry affairs of .cn under the Cyberspace Administration of China. Founded on 3 June 1997, it is now a government department based in ...

, JPNIC, KRNIC, TWNIC, THNIC, HKNIC and SGNIC led by

* 1999-02: Presentation of Report on IDN at Joint APNG-APTLD meeting, at APRICOT'99 * 1999-03: Endorsement of the IDN Report at APNG General Meeting 1 March 1999. * 1999-06: Grant application by APNG jointly with the Centre for Internet Research (CIR), National University of Singapore, to the International Development Research Center (IDRC), a Canadian Government funded international organisation to work on IDN for IPv6. This APNG Project was funded under the Pan Asia R&D Grant administered on behalf of IDRC by the Canadian Committee on Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS). Principal Investigator: Tan Tin Wee of National University of Singapore. * 1999-07 Tout, Walid R. (WALID Inc.) filed IDNA patent application number US1999000358043 "Method and system for internationalizing domain names". Published 2001-01-30. * 1999-07: Internet Draft on UTF5 by James Seng, Martin Dürst and Tan Tin Wee. Renewed 2000. * 1999-08: APTLD and APNG forms a

working group A working group, or working party, is a group of experts working together to achieve specified goals. The groups are domain-specific and focus on discussion or activity around a specific subject area. The term can sometimes refer to an interdis ...

to look into IDN issues chaired by Kilnam Chon. * 1999-10: BIX Pte. Ltd. and National University of Singapore together with New York Venture Capital investors,

General Atlantic Partners General Atlantic (also known as "GA") is an American Growth capital, growth equity firm providing capital and strategic support for global growth companies, headquartered in New York City, New York, United States. The firm was founded in 1980 as t ...

, spun off the IDN effort into 2 new Singapore companies – i-DNS.net International Inc. and i-Email.net Pte. Ltd. that created the first commercial implementation of an IDN solution for both domain names and IDN email addresses respectively. * 1999-11:

IDN Birds-of-Feather in Washington was initiated by i-DNS.net at the request of IETF officials. * 1999-12: i-DNS.net InternationalPte. Ltd. launched the first commercial IDN. It was in

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the nort ...

and in

Chinese character Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the Written Chinese, writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are k ...

s under the top-level IDN TLD ".gongsi" (meaning loosely ".com") with endorsement by the Minister of Communications of Taiwan and some major Taiwanese ISPs with reports of over 200 000 names sold in a week in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia,

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

, Australia and USA. * Late 1999: Kilnam Chon initiates Task Force on IDNS which led to formation of MINC, the Multilingual Internet Names Consortium. * 2000-01:

IDN Working Group formed chaired by

and Marc Blanchet. * 2000-01: The second ever commercial IDN launch was IDN TLDs in the Tamil Language, corresponding to .com, .net, .org, and .edu. These were launched in India with IT Ministry support by i-DNS.net International. * 2000-02: Multilingual Internet Names Consortium (MINC) Proposal BoF at IETF Adelaide. * 2000-03: APRICOT 2000 Multilingual DNS session. * 2000-04: WALID Inc. (with IDNA patent-pending application 6182148) started Registration & Resolving Multilingual Domain Names. * 2000-05: Interoperability Testing WG, MINC meeting. San Francisco, chaired by Bill Manning and Y. Yoneya, 12 May 2000. * 2000-06: Inaugural Launch of the Multilingual Internet Names Consortium (MINC) in Seoul to drive the collaborative roll-out of IDN starting from the Asia Pacific. * 2000-07: Joint Engineering TaskForce (JET) was initiated in Yokohama to study technical issues led by JPNIC (K.Konishi)and TWNIC (Kenny Huang). * 2000-07: Official Formation of CDNC (

Chinese Domain Name Consortium The Chinese Domain Name Consortium, created on 19 May 2000, is a collaboration among the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan), Hong Kong and Macau to come up with a standard way to create a domain name system for Chinese charac ...

) to resolve issues related to and to deploy

Han Character Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanji' ...

domain names, founded by

, TWNIC, HKNIC and MONIC in May 2000. * 2001-03: ICANN Board IDN Working Group formed. * 2001-07: Japanese Domain Name Association: JDNA Launch Ceremony (July 13, 2001) in Tokyo, Japan. * 2001-07: Urdu Internet Names System (July 28, 2001) in Islamabad, Pakistan, Organised Jointly by SDNP and MINC. * 2001-07: Presentation on IDN to the Committee Meeting of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Academies USA (JULY 11–13, 2001) at University of California School of Information Management and Systems, Berkeley, CA. * 2001-08: MINC presentation and outreach at the Asia Pacific Advanced Network annual conference, Penang, Malaysia, 20 August 2001 * 2001-10: Joint MINC-CDNC Meeting in Beijing 18–20 October 2001. * 2001-11: ICANN IDN Committee formed, Ram Mohan (Afilias) appointed as Charter Member. * 2001-12: Joint ITU-WIPO Symposium on Multilingual Domain Names organized in association with MINC, 6–7 December 2001, International Conference Center, Geneva. * 2003-01: ICANN IDN Guidelines Working Group formed with membership from leading gTLD and ccTLD registries. * 2003-01: Free implementation of stringprep, Punycode, and IDNA are released in GNU Libidn. * 2003-03: Publication of RFC 3454, RFC 3490, RFC 3491 and RFC 3492. * 2003-06: Publication of ICANN IDN guidelines for registries. Adopted by .cn, .info, .jp, .org, and .tw registries. * 2004-05: Publication of RFC 3743, Joint Engineering Team (JET) Guidelines for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) Registration and Administration for

, Japanese, and Korean. * 2005-03: First Study Group 17 of ITU-T meeting on Internationalized Domain Names. * 2005-05: .IN ccTLD (India) creates an expert IDN Working Group to create solutions for 22 official languages. Ram Mohan was appointed lead for technical implementation. C-DAC appointed a linguistic expert. * 2006-04: ITU Study Group 17 meeting in Korea gave final approval to the Question on Internationalized Domain Names. * 2006-06: Workshop on IDN at ICANN meeting at Marrakech, Morocco. * 2006-11: ICANN GNSO IDN Working Group created to discuss policy implications of IDN TLDs.

Ram Mohan Ram Mohan (26 August 1931 – 11 October 2019) was an Indian animator, title designer and design educator, who was also known as father of Indian Animation and was a veteran in the Indian animation industry, who started his career at the Cartoo ...

elected Chair of the IDN Working Group. * 2006-12: ICANN meeting in São Paulo discusses status of * 2007-01: Tamil and Malayalam variant table work completed by India's C-DAC and

. * 2007-03: ICANN GNSO IDN Working Group completes work,

presents a report at ICANN Lisboa meeting. * 2007-10: Eleven IDNA

s were added to the

root nameserver A root name server is a name server for the root zone of the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. It directly answers requests for records in the root zone and answers other requests by returning a list of the authoritative name servers f ...

s in order to evaluate the use of IDNA at the top level of the DNS. * 2008-01: ICANN: Successful Evaluations of .test IDN TLDs. * 2008-02: IDN Workshop: IDNs in Indian Languages and Scripts, ICANN, DIT, Afilias, C-DAC, NIXI lead. * 2008-04:

IDNAbis WG chaired by

Vint Cerf Vinton Gray Cerf (; born June 23, 1943) is an American Internet pioneer and is recognized as one of " the fathers of the Internet", sharing this title with TCP/IP co-developer Bob Kahn. He has received honorary degrees and awards that include ...

continues the work to update IDNA. * 2008-04: Arabic Script IDN Working Group (ASIWG) founded by Ram Mohan (Afilias) and Alexa Raad (PIR) in Dubai. * 2008-06: ICANN board votes to develop final fast-track implementation proposal for a limited number of IDN ccTLDS. * 2008-06: Arabic Script IDN Working Group (ASIWG) membership expands to Egypt, Iran, Kuwait, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, UAE, Malaysia, UN ESCWA, APTLD, ISOC Africa, and invited experts Michael Everson and John Klensin. * 2008-10: ICANN Seeks Interest in IDN ccTLD Fast-Track Process. * 2009-09: ICANN puts IDN ccTLD proposal on agenda for Seoul meeting in October 2009. * 2009-10: ICANN approves the registration of IDN names in the root of the DNS through the IDN ccTLD Fast-Track process at its meeting in Seoul, 26–30 October 2009. * 2010-01: ICANN announces that Egypt, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates were the first countries to have passed the Fast-Track String Evaluation within the IDN ccTLD domain application process. * 2010-05: The first implementations go live. They are the ccTLDs in the Arabic alphabet for Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. * 2010-08: The

publishes the updated "IDNA2008" specifications as

RFC RFC may refer to: Computing * Request for Comments, a memorandum on Internet standards * Request for change, change management * Remote Function Call, in SAP computer systems * Rhye's and Fall of Civilization, a modification for Sid Meier's Civ ...

5890–5894. * 2010-12: ICANN Board IDN Variants Working Group formed to oversee and track the IDN Variant Issues Project. Members of the working group are Ram Mohan (Chair), Jonne Soininen, Suzanne Woolf, and Kuo-Wei Wu. * 2012-02:

International email International email arises from the combined provision of ''internationalized domain names'' (IDN) and ''email address internationalization'' (EAI).Started with: The result is email that contains international characters (characters which do not e ...

was standardized, utilizing IDN.

References

External links

* "Preparation of Internationalized Strings ('stringprep')" * "Internationalized Domain Names for Applications (IDNA): Definitions and Document Framework" * "Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA): Protocol" * "The Unicode Code Points and Internationalized Domain Names for Applications (IDNA)" * "Right-to-Left Scripts for Internationalized Domain Names for Applications (IDNA)"
ICANN Internationalized Domain Names

IDN Language Table Registry

Unicode Technical Report #36 – Security Considerations for the Implementation of Unicode and Related Technology
{{DEFAULTSORT:Internationalized Domain Name