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Message from Vincent W.S. Chen to Paul Twomey

Via Email

Subject: Support for the IDN Implementation Guidelines and Request for Authorization to Begin Accepting IDN Registrations
Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 18:22:42 +0800
From: "Vincent WS Chen"
To: "'Paul Twomey'"
CC: "'Louis Touton'" , "'Andrew McLaughlin'", "'TWNIC Secretariat'"

Dear Dr. Twomey,

This letter presents TWNIC's request for authorization to begin accepting internationalized domain name (IDN) registrations containing hyphens in the third and fourth positions, pursuant to Attachment G, Part 4 to the ccTLD Sponsorship Agreement between TWNIC and ICANN.

At its Rio de Janeiro meeting, the ICANN Board authorized the President of ICANN to issue authorizations on the basis of a set of consensus Guidelines for Implementation of IDNs under discussion by the leading IDN registries. TWNIC has participated in the drafting of these consensus Guidelines. We are pleased to commit to adhere to them in our implementation of IDNs, and on that basis we submit this request for authorization. Recognizing that the Internet community will gain experience with IDN registration policies and procedures as the deployment of IDN services proceeds, we also commit to cooperate with our peer registries and ICANN in good faith to review the Guidelines at regular intervals over the coming years.

Thank you and I look forward to your reply.

Best regards,

Vincent W.S. Chen
Executive Director
Taiwan Network Information Center (TWNIC)

Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."