ICANN Comment on NSI Registry Multilingual Domain Name Testbed

(25 August 2000) Yesterday, NSI Registry announced its plans to open a testbed for ICANN-accredited registrars to register domain names in non-English language character sets in .com, .net, and .org.

ICANN recognizes that it is important that the Internet evolve to be more accessible to those who do not use English-language character sets. At the same time, the internationalization of the Internet's domain name system must be accomplished through standards that are open, non-proprietary, and fully compatible with the Internet's existing end-to-end model and that preserve globally unique naming in a universally resolvable public name space. ICANN strongly supports the principle stated by the IETF's working group on Internationalized Domain Names:

"A fundamental requirement in this work is to not disturb the current use and operation of the domain name system, and for the DNS to continue to allow any system anywhere to resolve any domain name."

With those goals in mind, ICANN intends to monitor closely the implementation of non-English language character sets by NSI Registry in the .com, .net, and .org top-level domains.