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ICANN has opened a 30-day public comment period on a draft revised version of the Guidelines for the Implementation of Internationalized Domain Names ("IDN Guidelines"). This draft reflects the experiences of the IDN registries in the implementation of Version 1.0 of the guidelines. Particular attention has been paid to concerns that have arisen about the deceptive use of visually confusable characters from different scripts in individual IDN labels.

Analysis concerning such usage has been ongoing for several months and culminated when the IDN registries met during the ICANN meeting in Luxembourg. Some of the results from this meeting and from the Luxembourg IDN workshop have been reflected in the draft revised IDN Guidelines. This includes:

• The registries will follow established authoritative language tables when such exist.
• The registries will not permit the co-mingling of scripts in a domain label when no language table exists.
• The successor document to the current guidelines must maximize the ability of a registry to support IDN in all regards where it is reasonably needed, and must minimize the ability for the abuse of IDN for deceptive purposes.
• Policies based on script are needed in addition to those based solely on language, and developing script-based policies should be an immediate focus of action.

Following the Luxembourg ICANN meeting, a working group of registries with IDN experience was formed to work on a revision of the guidelines, to be put forth for public comment. The working group includes the following members:

• gTLD Registry Constituency Representatives:
  • Cary Karp, MuseDoma
  • Pat Kane, VeriSign
  • Ram Mohan, Afilias
• ccNSO Representatives:
  • Hiro Hotta, JPRS
  • Mohammed EL Bashir, .sd Registry
• ICANN Staff:
  • Tina Dam

The revised version is now posted for public comments, and will subsequently be modified in accordance with commentary received. A final draft of version 2.0 will then be submitted to the ICANN Board for endorsement.

The IDN Guidelines v.1.0 can be found here.

The draft IDN Guidelines v.2.0 can be found here. Comments must be submitted by 23 October 2005, 23:00 UTC.

Click here to view comments regarding draft IDN Guidelines v.2.0