This is the home page for the Nominet policy working group on Internationalised Domain Names. 

Chair
Clive D.W. Feather clive@demon.net

Mailing Lists
General discussion is at nom-pwg-idn@lists.nominet.org.uk but you must subscribe first.
NOTE: All messages sent to this list are published on a public archive.

Description
Traditionally, domain names have been represented in a very small subset of ASCII, comprising only 26 latin letters, 10 digits, hyphen, and dot (the "traditional DNS character set", or "tDNS charset"). As the Internet has become a global phenomenon, it has become increasingly clear that this is unworkable - the traditional character set is insufficient even for the names of English companies, let alone domains for those based in countries that do not even use the Latin alphabet. 

At the same time, a large amount of infrastructure assumes the use of the tDNS charset. Changing this would be a major, if not impossible, exercise.

The IETF has addressed this by producing a number of Standards Track RFCs (RFC 3490 to 3492) to introduce mechanisms to address this; these are known collectively as IDNA (Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications), and they allow applications such as email or web servers to use the full Unicode repertoire of characters in domain names.

The task of the working group is to address the issues of IDNA as they apply to Nominet. Varying IDNA or adopting alternative mechanisms is specifically NOT in scope.

The group may also look at ongoing IETF work in this area, but should not be involved in or duplicating such work.  The IDN working group will consider whether or not Nominet should implement support for IDNA; in particular, it will consider:

• whether there is significant demand from stakeholders for IDNA, and, if not, whether such demand is likely to materialize in relevant timescales;
• if Nominet is not to support IDNA, what its policy should be on names that are IDNA-encoded;
• if Nominet is to support IDNA:
  • whether IDNA support within Nominet should be limited to certain languages and/or character sets, or whether there should be multiple levels of support;
  • how IDNA support should be provided within the various Nominet processes (e.g. automaton support);
  • issues relating to ease of use (e.g. the need for encoding and translation tools both within Nominet and for registrars and end users);
• the potential problems that IDNA (whether supported or not) may cause to the Dispute Resolution Service and other Nominet processes.

It will propose outline solutions and policies to address these matters, and identify and make recommendations on the issues these proposals will raise. It will also make recommendations on timescales.

In line with the PAB's remit of policy advice, it will not produce detailed solutions or implementation plans.

Goals and Milestones

• August PAB meeting: proposal for stakeholder consultation
• mid-October: consultation response period closes
• December PAB meeting: report to PAB

Documents

• Internationalised Domain Names and Nominet - an introduction [Download as a pdf file]
  
• Internationalised Domain Names and Nominet - Consultation Document [Download as a pdf file]