(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:
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. |