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ICANN raises concerns over VeriSign IDN change
9 January, 2003
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has expressed concerns regarding a service launched last Friday by VeriSign designed to handle internationalised domain names (IDNs).
According to ICANN, "some commentators" are worried that the VeriSign service is using technology that is contrary to Internet Domain Name System (DNS) standards to respond to DNS address requests containing non-ASCII characters, the Marina del Rey, California, group said in an advisory posted on its website.
"In response to these expressions of concern, ICANN has requested the advice of the Internet Architecture Board, which is responsible for providing oversight of the architecture for the protocols and procedures used by the Internet, on the changes announced by VeriSign Global Registry Services (VGRS)," ICANN says.
The DNS was designed to support 38 English-language ASCII characters, but international domain names draw from the non-ASCII 96,000-character Unicode repertoire. Domain names in languages other than English must therefore be encoded in ASCII for transmission across the DNS in order for them to work.
In October, the IDN working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a standards-setting body, released a first mechanism, called Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) that seeks to handle internationalised domain names in a standard fashion by allowing non-ASCII characters to be represented using only the ASCII characters. The IETF group is also represented in ICANN's IDN committee.
More details at: http://www.idgnet.co.nz/webhome.nsf/UNID/95E17C8CCCB8252CCC256CA8000D1369!opendocument
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