Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) enable users to enter the URL of the website in a browser in his native language. Earlier this was limited only to Latin characters; however, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) now permits Internationalized Domain Names.
ICANN has also opened its policy to permit new generic Top Level Domain Names (gTLDs), which were earlier limited to .INFO, .MOBI, etc. Soon one can apply for the name of one’s company or a city such as .kolkata or .delhi or .mumbai.
With this in mind, the Department of Information Technology (DIT), Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI), Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and Afilias have organized a one-day conference in Hyderabad to explain to the relevant stake holders the concept of the new gTLDs, the application process, the timelines and financial implications of the same.
The conference will also cover iinitiatives undertaken by DIT to ensure that Indian languages find their rightful place in Internationalized Domain Names.
Alliance designed to help Chinese companies apply for “dot.BRAND” top-level domains
ICANN SINGAPORE – June 20, 2011 – Afilias Limited, a global provider of Internet domain name registry and Managed DNS services, today announced that it has entered into a formal agreement with Chinese Internet services leader HiChina, a subsidiary of Alibaba.com, to help Chinese brands take advantage of ICANN’s New TLD Program.
The agreement recognizes HiChina’s leadership and customer service excellence, and names HiChina as Afilias’ preferred new TLD partner in China. Chinese brands who intend to establish a dot.BRAND presence online will benefit from the combined resources of Afilias, a global leader in new TLD registry services, and HiChina, a trusted Chinese market Internet expert.
“With the world’s largest Internet population, China also represents one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Brands based in China need unique marketing approaches to reach this large, diverse pool of consumers. One approach is a ‘dot.BRAND’ name, meaning the use of a brand name instead of a .com or .net,” said Roland LaPlante, Senior Vice President of Afilias. “A dot.BRAND TLD lets major companies control how customers experience their brand online and helps break through the noise and clutter online.”
LaPlante added, “With the tremendous rise of Chinese language on the Internet, our partnership will enable Chinese brands to present their domains in Chinese script rather than in English alone.”
“Chinese consumers want domain names and websites in their own language. The combined experience of Afilias and HiChina will provide a great user experience for the Chinese market,” said Bridge Song, Vice President of HiChina.
HiChina is the leading Internet services provider in China, and provides comprehensive Web services to Chinese enterprises, including domain registration, hosting, email systems and website creation & management.
“With HiChina’s reach and influence in the Chinese enterprise market, and Afilias’ successful history of supporting more TLDs than any other company, this partnership helps ensure that Chinese brands are on equal footing with Western brands applying for dot.BRAND TLDs,” added Bridge Song.
ICANN approved the new TLD program on June 20, 2011, at the current ICANN global meeting in Singapore.
Brands interested in pursuing a dot.BRAND approach will need to act quickly to develop strong, compelling proposals to ICANN for their desired new TLD string, one of many areas where Afilias is able to assist TLD applicants. Other Afilias TLD registry services include a ”thick” EPP registry, a globally diverse and redundant Anycast DNS network, and 24x7 call-center and technical support.
In addition, Afilias offers other premium solutions to augment its registry offering, including technology to enable mobile phone compatibility for websites and a unique IDN-capable email solution. All Afilias services are DNSSEC and IPv6 ready, and reflect 10 years of experience in supporting gTLDs operating under ICANN contracts.
About Afilias
Afilias is a global provider of Internet infrastructure services that connect people to their data. Afilias’ reliable, secure, scalable, and globally available technology supports a wide range of applications including Internet domain registry services and Managed DNS. For more information on Afilias, visit www.afilias.info.
About HiChina
HiChina, a subsidiary of Alibaba.com, is the leading Internet services provider in China. HiChina provides comprehensive Web services to enterprises, including domain registration, hosting, enterprise email systems, enterprise website creation & management, and e-commerce applications consultation. HiChina is an accredited domain registrar by both ICANN and CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center). Currently, HiChina manages and hosts more than three million English and Chinese domains, and also serves more than 500,000 enterprise users with fast, stable and secure websites and email hosting services. Headquartered in Beijing, HiChina currently has 16 branches and more than 10,000 agents in 31 provinces and cities across China. Visit http://en.hichina.com to learn more.
Internationalized domain names (IDNs) have been available to Internet users for many years, but this year the first fully non-Latin IDN domains have become enabled by ICANN and country-code top-level domain registries. The recent success of the launch of Russia's .рф (.rf) ccTLD shows that there is an enormous demand for domain names in Internet users' native languages.
While speaking and writing in one's own language is of course universal, actually enabling that language in the DNS is an extremely complex problem. Because the ubiquitous, legacy, portions of the DNS can only accept and resolve ASCII labels, non-Latin scripts such as Chinese, Cyrillic and Greek need to be encoded into ASCII by applications before they can be used on the Internet to visit websites or exchange emails.
For years, everyone has used an IETF standard called IDNA to map Unicode (which can be used to represent essentially all characters in all languages) into the 37 ASCII characters (Letters, Digits, Hyphen) allowable in DNS. But as Unicode evolved, the old IDNA protocol did not evolve with it. So the IETF is currently developing what it calls IDNABIS, or IDNA2008, to de-couple IDNs from any specific version of Unicode while maintaining an unambiguous one-to-one relationship between IDNs as they appear in applications and as they appear in the DNS. Companies that decide to apply to ICANN to operate new TLDs in IDN languages will have to use the new specification and registries that have implemented the earlier version of IDNA will also have to upgrade to the 2008 version.
Because it is such as complex subject, and because ICANN plans to release new, revised technical guidelines for registries managing IDNs, ICANN hosted an informational session at its December 2010 meeting in Cartagena, Colombia, in which registries including Afilias shared their experiences with launching, managing and transitioning IDNs.
Some languages and scripts, such as Arabic, have multiple ways of expressing the same string of characters that typically represent a word. Therefore, speakers discussed issues with "bundling" domain registrations where two strings would have the same meaning to a native human speaker but are represented differently in Unicode. To give an English example, because the DNS is designed to be authoritative and unambiguous, it is akin to the question of whether color.com and colour.com should resolve to the same address.
At the ICANN session, Marina Nikerova of the .рф registry explained that the new Russian ccTLD did not experience any of these code point problems, as Cyrillic has only one script to work with, but said that usability remains a concern. The .рф domain has achieved broad browser support, she said, but search engines such as Google still frequently return ASCII domains first when users search for Cyrillic. She referenced an example of the word "известия", which means "news" and is the name of a major Russian newspaper.
While the browser problem may be substantially solved for .рф, one problem it and other IDN registries continue to experience is that the current e-mail protocol does not allow for the use of non-ASCII characters as the e-mail address listed as the sender or recipient. IDN email is currently subject to a parallel IETF initiative called EAI, for E-mail Address Internationalization, which expects to publish its final specifications next year. Nikerova said that solving the e-mail problem, which includes enabling IDN characters in the username before the @ symbol, will likely lead to a "next wave" of registrations in the new Russian TLD.
The fact that lack of e-mail support could inhibit the adoption of IDNs is a problem Afilias has addressed with a newly developed IDN E-Mail software. Afilias' VP of product development Michael Young told the ICANN session that the software is a "soup-to-nuts" solution for handling IDN e-mail on desktop and mobile devices, as well as providing the server-side support for IDNs in, for example, Web-based email.
The first demonstration of email transmission using a fully Internationalized address held at the APTLD Members Meeting in Amman, Jordan
AMMAN, JORDAN - 29 October 2010 - Afilias, a global provider of Internet infrastructure services, and the National Information Technology Center of Jordan today announced that they have partnered to produce the first public demonstration of an e-mail message between two completely internationalized (or IDN) e-mail addresses in the Arabic language, using Afilias' new IDN e-mail technology and a fully IDN domain name and IDN TLD from the .JO registry.
"With the 83 percent of the world's population estimated to be non-English speaking, this is an important first step in bringing a useful Internet to the majority of the world's Internet users which were previously shut-out of using the Internet in their native language," said John Kane, Vice President of Corporate Services for Afilias. "The adoption of IDN domain names has been inhibited by the lack of technical support within e-mail programs for internationalized addresses which would still be compatible with the global DNS system. With Afilias' unique and standards-compliant IDN e-mail solution, we are able to finally address this problem and facilitate IDN adoption in any language."
"The final link in the conversion of the Web to a truly global audience is to give all users of the Internet their website and e-mail identity in a form that truly represents them, in their own language," added Dr. Nabeel Al-Fayoumi, Government CIO / Director General of the National IT Center / .jo and .الاردن Registry. "We are pleased to cooperate with Afilias on an historic and important move forward in technology that will empower Arabic and other non-English speaking Internet users around the world to communicate in their own language."
The Jordanian registry officially launched the Arabic version of its ccTLD as .alordon which translates to xn--mgbayh7gpa using the Punycode algorithm and is visible in Arabic as الاردن. Registration in the new IDN version of the ccTLD was launched on October 11, 2010, beginning with a sunrise period for Governmental Entities and Diplomatic Missions, and shall be followed by a registration period for trademark holders.
About Internationalized Domain Names and IDN e-mail
Internet users are familiar with using domains that are written in ASCII (Latin/English characters) - on websites, in e-mail, and in many other Internet applications. Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) were first launched in 2004 based on an IETF standard called IDNA (RFC 5890), which uses the Punycode encoding algorithm to represent non-ASCII characters found in Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Hindi and other languages, into ASCII names that the DNS system can resolve. This allows Internet users to type a domain name in their local script using their native language, instead of an English translation. For further information, please visit (http://www.afilias.info/IDN-Backgrounder).
Since 2004, businesses and individual users have been able to register second level IDN domains in many scripts across many top-level domain (TLD) extensions. However, both the user name portion of an e-mail address and the TLD itself has been ASCII-only. Recently ICANN approved the introduction of IDNs at the top level, so TLDs like .jo can now be visible in a native script like Arabic as .الاردن.
Afilias IDN E-mail is a software package that supports "E-mail Address Internationalization" (EAI), a standard under development by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). This standard removes the restriction of English-only alphabets in e-mail addresses. Afilias' IDN e-mail application allows people to use almost any language in their e-mail address. The Afilias implementation follows RFC 4952 and additional draft RFCs that are in the process of being standardized. These changes allow both the username and the domain name of an e-mail address to be in any language/script represented in the Unicode standard.
For more information about Afilias' IDN E-mail solution and how to become a beta partner, please visit www.afilias.info/idnemail.
About the .jo and .الاردن Registry
NITC is the only accredited registrar of domain names under .JO ccTLD and .الاردن IDN ccTLD, was granted this registration privilege by ICANN, a body concerned with the development of Internet technology and management of domain names.
NITC basically aims at efficiently providing the DNS registration service to the public by following the worldwide best practices by maintaining a solid operating environment that secures the customer rights and following a transparency policy of publishing the database of registered domain names under the .JO ccTLD and .الاردن IDN ccTLD.
NITC's policy in domain registration under .JO and .الاردن complies with the worldwide recognized policies and best practices with essential modifications that accommodate the Jordanian culture and the Jordanian Laws to protect the rights of the others.
About Afilias
Afilias is a global provider of Internet infrastructure services that connect people to their data. Afilias' reliable, secure, scalable, and globally available technology supports a wide range of applications including Internet domain registry services, Managed DNS, and services in the RFID and supply chain market with its Afilias Discovery Services. For more information on Afilias please visit www.afilias.info.
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(1) Due to the current status of the EAI draft protocol, sending e-mail to these IDN addresses from outside of Afilias' IDN e-mail system is not yet supported.
Afilias is a sponsor of the upcoming APTLD event in Jordan. Afilias VP, John Kane will be presenting on Internationalized Domain Names on Oct. 30th at 16:00.
Afilias is a Gold Sponsor of the APRICOT 2010 Meeting. The ten-day long summit consists of seminars, workshops, tutorials, conference sessions, birds-of-a-feather (BOFs), and other forums all with the goal of spreading and sharing the knowledge required to operate the Internet within the Asia Pacific region.
DUBLIN, IRELAND – 6 October 2009 – Today Afilias President & CEO Hal Lubsen released the following statement concerning ICANN’s new Affirmation of Commitments with the US Department of Commerce:
Afilias commends ICANN and the U.S. Department of Commerce on over a decade of work in supporting the Domain Name System and in taking an important step in promoting the private sector led, bottom up consensus model for the DNS. We appreciate the special efforts by Rod Beckstrom, the ICANN staff, Peter Dengate Thrush, the entire ICANN board, and the U.S. Department of Commerce in reaching this new commitment. We are encouraged by the Affirmation of Commitments which provides a framework to ensure ICANN’s accountability and transparency to the global community. This new framework promises a commitment to a bottom-up, multi-stakeholder development process that will review the positive and negative effects of ICANN’s decisions, including any impact on the public, as well as the systemic security, stability and resiliency of the DNS. The additional focus on consumer protection and internationalization is also most welcome. Executing on these promises will require the full attention of ICANN and the entire ICANN community. We look forward to working toward this shared vision.
BEIJING - August 6, 2009 - Afilias, a global provider of Internet infrastructure services, today announced that it has joined the Chinese Domain Name Consortium (CDNC). Afilias will work with the CDNC to coordinate and collaborate with other registries to reach Chinese language Internet users with Internationalized Domain Name technology. Afilias is a registry services provider to nearly 15 million domain names, across 15 top-level domains (TLDs).
"The importance of the Chinese domain name market cannot be understated," said Mr. Ram Mohan, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. "With more Chinese language Internet users than the entire population of the US, and the availability of domain names in the Chinese language using Internationalized Domain Name technology, China is a high priority market for Afilias."
"The accession of Afilias has strengthened CDNC. It is a great showcase of the increasing interest and influence towards Web addressing in Chinese characters, particularly given that ICANN is planning to launch its new policies on new TLD and IDN applications," said Professor Qian Hualin, the Co-Chairman of CDNC.
CDNC was established in Beijing by four Network Information Centers (NIC) in the Chinese speaking community -- CNNIC, TWNIC, HKIRC and MONIC in 2000. Its aim is to harmonize, promote and self-regulate registry operations and services of Chinese domain names. Members of CDNC recently revised their Articles of Association in June 2009 to make the organization more accessible and collaborative with the international Internet community, and expand membership to other registries.
Professor Shian-Shyong Tseng, Co-Chairman of CDNC emphasized that "CDNC welcomes Afilias to the CDNC and looks forward to working closely to further the growth of Chinese Domain Names."
Mr. Mohan noted that "Membership in CDNC will provide Afilias with an excellent platform to exchange ideas and to initiate collaboration with other registries. We look forward to discussing issues such as administration standards for Chinese domain names, variant management at the second and top level, 3-character domains, as well as DNS security issues like spam, phishing and botnets."
Mr. Mohan visited the Secretariat of CDNC and CNNIC on Monday, August 3rd, 2009 to deliver briefing reports on relevant DNS security and IDN technology developments. During his visit, Mr. Mohan commended CNNIC for its leadership in Chinese domain name promotion and development, as well as its remarkable achievements in DNS security and its high-performance SLA. The members of CDNC, DotAsia's CEO Mr. Edmon Chung and Vice President Mr. Ching Chiao, were also among the delegates of this visit.
Ram Mohan, EVP of Afilias met the Director General of CNNIC, Mr. Mao Wei.
About Afilias
Afilias is a global provider of Internet infrastructure services that connect people to their data. Afilias' reliable, secure, scalable, and globally available technology supports a wide range of applications including Internet domain registry services, Managed DNS, and services in the RFID and supply chain market with its Afilias Discovery Services.
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