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A Swedish company, Autonomica, began trials of internationalised domain names (IDNs) on ICANN's behalf in December, investigating whether the addition of encoded internationalised characters would have any impact on the operations of the servers that direct Internet users to the required website. Autonomica successfully deployed IDNs using the two major server implementations used by most root server operators: BIND and NSD.

In addition to accented European characters, IDNs support non-ASCII characters such as those used in right-to-left scripts, Arabic for instance, and non-alphabetic scripts, including Mandarin Chinese and Japanese. ICANN's aims is that an entire domain name can be rendered in local characters.

'The global deployment of IDNs will enhance the local Internet experience in large

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regions of the world by enabling people to share and access information or use services offered in their own languages,' it states.

ICANN announced its plans to introduce IDNs a year ago, before elaborating on its plans at the inaugural Internet Governance Forum in October, when its chairman, Vint Cerf, described IDNs as a 'huge technical challenge'. No date for their introduction has yet been publicly announced, with ICANN chief executive Paul Twomey saying only that despite significant pressure from the non-English-speaking world IDN implementation would not be rushed.

ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Number) is the US Government body that oversees the entire root domain structure, ensuring that when you type a website URL you end up where you intended. Last October it signed an agreement with the US Department of Commerce that it says will make it more autonomous, and going some way to satisfying widespread pressure for the US administration to grant it full independence. A final decision on this will be made in 2008.