IGF - Major changes ahead for domain name system

 

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By Simon Aughton

Posted on 31 Oct 2006 at 12:20

The chairman of ICANN has given the biggest indication yet of a major change ahead for the domain name system.

Vint Cerf told the open session of the inaugural Internet Governance Forum that he accepts that it will be necessary to expand the range of characters that can be used in domain name so that individuals and organisations can include characters from their own languages in their websites' URLs.

'There is a strong interest in the existing and nascent Internet community to have the ability to register domain names written in the characters used in their preferred languages,' he told the audience in Athens, Greece, before adding that, 'therein lies a huge technical challenge.'

One solution that he did rule out is permitting the entire range of Unicode characters in domain names, not least because Unicode is continually expanding as new languages are added. Domain names, he said, need to work in the future, regardless of changes to Unicode.

'One of the most important aspects of the Internet is the ability for every user to make unambiguous references to every registered domain name,' he said. 'Historically, this global feature has been achieved in part by restricting host domain names to be expressed in a small subset of the Latin characters A-Z, the digits 0-9 and the hyphen. It is well understood that this will not suffice for users whose native languages use characters other than these. At the same time, it is vital to preserve the global ability to refer to and use every domain name.'

What he proposed is permitting a 'carefully chosen subset' of Unicode characters in what are known as international domain names, or IDNs. Accomplishing that, he said, will require 'extraordinary expertise'.

'Adding IDNs at all levels in the domain names system potentially affects every application that makes use of domain names,' he said. 'The mechanisms of the domain name system make demands on the normalisation and matching of domain name strings that far exceed the simpler requirement that natural language strings be renderable using Unicode.'

ICANN, the organisation that oversees the entire domain name system, began testing IDNs in the summer and Cerf's comments seem to suggest that the results have so far been positive.

Vint Cerf - also known as one of the 'founding fathers of the Internet' - played a technical key role in the creation of the Internet, specifically the TCP/IP protocols on which it is based.