IDN Guidelines Working Group

IDN Guidelines Working Group
Status:
Issue Areas:	IDNs
Date Established:	October 21, 2015
Charter:	[ WG Charter]
Workspace:	Community Wiki

The IDN Guidelines Working Group (IDNGWG) was formed in 2015, after a Call for Community Experts published on July 20, 2015 in order to revise the IDN Implementation Guidelines, last updated in 2011. In this call, ICANN solicited the participation of expert community volunteers to form a working group for this purpose, which would be comprised of expert members from GNSO, ccNSO, SSAC and ALAC.

The first meeting ocurred on October 21, 2015.

Background

Historically, the IDN Implementation Guidelines have been updated when there was a change to relevant protocols or other demand from the community, but not on a regular basis. Until the 2015 Call for Community Experts, there were five versions of the Guidelines, Version 3.0 being the most recent.

Since publication of the latest version of the Guidelines in 2011, there had been changes in the terminology around IDNs and language tables, as well as a definition of the formal representation of the language tables to make them machine readable. Additional analysis and data were also available, including Maximal Starting Repertoire (MSR), informational RFC 6912 and revised IANA IDNA tables for Unicode 6.3.0. Finally there have been recommendations for consistency and manageability of variants across different levels in a domain name, e.g. in the User Experience Study and related SSAC comments in SAC 60 report.

Based on the experience with implementing IDNs accumulated since 2011, GNSO Council and its members have asked ICANN to update these guidelines.

Group Formation

The Call for Community Experts requested that its members possessed expertise in one or more of the following areas, as relevant for the second level:

• DNS and IDNA protocols;
• IDN language or script tables, including variants and label level rules;
• IDN policy;
• IDN implementation;
• IDN label registration process and registration data;
• IDN related SSR issues, including string similarity;
• IDN usability challenges and universal acceptance.

It was anticipated for the Working Group to have seven members: 3 from the GNSO, 2 from the ccNSO, 1 from SSAC and 1 for ALAC . The number of GNSO and ccNSO members were based on membership during previous revisions of IDN Implementation Guidelines. SSAC and ALAC members were added for additional consideration of Security, Stability & Resiliency (SSR) and usability issues.

The final group was composed by

• GNSO:
  • Chris Dillon (NCSG)
  • Christian Dawson (ISPCPC)
  • Jian Zhang (RySG)
  • Dennis Tan (RySG)
  • Edmon Chung (RySG)
  • Kal Feher (RySG)

• ccNSO:
  • Mats Dufberg
  • Pablo Rodriguez

• SSAC:
  • Ram Mohan
  • Patrik Fältström

• ALAC:
  • Wael Nasr
  • Satish Babu

• ICANN Support Staff:
  • Alireza Saleh
  • Sarmad Hussain

Internationalized Domain Name

Internationalized Domain Name

Generic Names Supporting Organization. Develops and recommends to the Board substantive policies relating to generic top-level domains and other responsibilities set forth in the Bylaws (ICANN Bylaws).

Country Code Names Supporting Organization. Develops and recommends to the Board global policies relating to country-code top-level domains (ICANN Bylaws).

Security and Stability Advisory Committee. Advises the ICANN community and Board on matters relating to the security and integrity of the Internet's naming and address allocation systems (ICANN Bylaws).

At-Large Advisory Committee. Considers and provides advice on the activities of ICANN related to the interests of individual Internet users (ICANN Bylaws). Not to be confused with the Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group.

Request For Comments. Archival series dedicated to documenting Internet technical specifications, including general contributions from the Internet research and engineering community as well as standards documents (RFC Editor Model, Version 3).

Internet Assigned Numbers Authority

Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group. Represents the full range of non-commercial entities of the Internet (ICANN Bylaws). Not to be confused with the At-Large Advisory Committee.