ICANN opens way for new top-level domains

ICANN will press ahead with plans to introduce new top-level domains, including some so-called Internationalized Domain Names written in Chinese and Arabic scripts, its board decided unanimously Thursday.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) began discussing extending the number of gTLDs (generic top-level domains) in 2005. Existing gTLDs include ".com," ".org," or ".biz."

Thursday's decision will not, of itself, create specific new gTLDs: The board has simply approved a policy proposal that will form the basis of a set of rules for creating and managing new gTLDs.

Until now ICANN has kept close control over the creation of TLDs, but Thursday's vote could allow the creation of as many new gTLDs as there are domain names under the ".com" TLD today -- more than 70 million. It could open the way for big corporations to run their own domains -- "france.ebay" instead of "ebay.fr," for instance -- or for linguistic communities to create transnational domains on the model of the existing ".cat" domain for speakers of Catalan.

"There is not currently any evidence to support establishing a limit to how many TLDs can be inserted in the root based on technical stability concerns," the board ruled, at the conclusion of a week-long public meeting of ICANN in Paris.

In reality, the limitations are more likely to be administrative than technical, said board member Dave Wodelet. ICANN must create systems for allocating the new gTLDs, and approving how they will be managed.

Susan Crawford, another board member, expressed concern about the provisions for rejecting domain names as a result of governments, on grounds of public order and morality, or Internet users, on the grounds that they were offended. She asked the board to limit such provisions as much as possible.

The board also approved the creation of a limited number of IDNs (Internationalized Domain Names) under a fast-track process for countries that urgently need them, while it continues working on a broader policy for IDNs.

The new policy could, for example, allow Chinese organizations to register domain names written using Chinese ideograms, ending with the two Chinese symbols meaning "China."

ICANN is already testing IDN TLDs to iron out technical problems. Thursday's vote is a step toward the creation of working IDN TLDs in a limited number of languages.

Putting commercial domain names in the ".com" TLD, Chinese names in ".cn" and Japanese names in ".jp" makes perfect sense -- if you speak English and are used to the Latin alphabet's 26 letters from A to Z. However, languages using accented letters, or altogether different scripts or writing systems, are left out in the cold. That's because the DNS (domain name system) infrastructure was only designed to handle ASCII characters, and not the tens of thousands of Unicode characters required to write languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, or Japanese.

ICANN has adopted a system called Punycode to encode TLDs written using Unicode characters into a sequence of letters, digits, and hyphens, allowing them to be stored by existing DNS servers, but there are still some questions that remain to be resolved, a process that could take years.

The fast-track process approved Thursday sets out a way for countries where the official language is written using a non-Latin script (such as Cyrillic, Arabic, or Chinese) to create a new TLD consisting of the country's name written in that script.

The board also approved actions to clamp down on domain name tasting, proposed by ICANN's Generic Names Supporting Organization, and to add support for DNSsec (DNS Security Extensions) to the ".org" domain, a decision which should increase confidence in the results returned by DNS servers for the ".org" TLD.