[gnso-idn-wg] ICANN News Alert -- ICANN Successfully Conducts Laboratory Tests of Internationalised Domain Names

["Bruce Tonkin" <Bruce.Tonkin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sent: Thursday, 8 March 2007 1:09 PM
Subject: [alerts] ICANN News Alert -- ICANN Successfully Conducts
Laboratory Tests of Internationalised Domain Names


ICANN <http://www.icann.org/>  

News Alert


http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-4-07mar07.htm

 

________________________________


ICANN Successfully Conducts Laboratory Tests of Internationalised Domain
Names


7 March 2007

In October, 2006, ICANN engaged Autonomica AB
<http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-19oct06.htm>  of
Stockholm, Sweden, to develop, conduct, and report on the results of
laboratory testing of internationalized top-level domains in a setting
corresponding to the public root. Quoting from their report, 

        Autonomica AB has, under a contract with ICANN, investigated
whether the addition of top level domains containing encoded
internationalized characters (so called IDNs) would have any impact on
the operations of the root name servers providing delegations, or the
iterative mode resolvers used to look up the information. No impact at
all could be detected. All involved systems behaved exactly as expected.


Internationalized domain names (IDNs) are domain names containing
characters other than those based on the ASCII character sets. Such
non-ASCII characters include those available in right-to-left scripts
(e.g., Arabic) and non-alphabetic scripts (e.g., Mandarin Chinese).
ICANN is actively involved in the efforts to make these available at the
top level-that is, so that an entire domain name can be rendered in
local characters. The global deployment of IDNs will enhance the local
Internet experience in large regions of the world by enabling people to
share and access information or use services offered in their own
languages. 

The laboratory technical test is one of the prerequisites to eventual
insert internationalized top level labels in the root zone. This test is
intended to determine the viability of internationalized top-level names
and the effect they may have on the DNS. The work was done by
replicating the root server environment. The test intentionally did not
incorporate the end-user perspective or a live root test. 

Autonomica reported successful insertion using two major server
implementations used by most root server operators: BIND and NSD. 

The test design was finalized in December of 2006 following a public
comment period. The test procedure was published
<http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-05dec06.htm>  so that
others can replicate the test. 

Details of the test setup and design can be found here
<http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-05dec06.htm> . 

Details of the test result can be found here
<http://www.icann.org/topics/idn/idn-report-15feb07.pdf> . [PDF, 73K]

For any questions or request for additional details of the test design
and result please contact Tina Dam at tina.dam@xxxxxxxxx

For further information around ICANN's IDN Program please visit
http://www.icann.org/topics/idn/

________________________________

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