ICANN Committees and Working Groups
Internationalized Domain Names Internal Working Group (Board of Directors)
(in operation March — November 2001)
Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) Committee
(in operation September 2001 — October 2003)
ICANN has posted correspondence relevant to IDNs here.
Message from Mao Wei to Paul Twomey (CNNIC) 18 June 2003
Message from Koki Higashida to Paul Twomey (Japan Registry Service Co., Ltd.) 18 June 2003
Message from Vincent W.S. Chen to Paul Twomey (TWNIC) 18 June 2003
Message from Paul Twomey to Koki Higashida (Japan Registry Service Co., Ltd.) 20 June 2003
Message from Paul Twomey to Vincent W.S. Chen (TWNIC) 20 June 2003
Letter from Paul Twomey to Ram Mohan (Afilias) 19 August 2003
Letter from Rusty Lewis to Paul Twomey (VeriSign) 13 October 2003
Letter from Paul Twomey to Edward Viltz (Public Interest Registry) 21 October 2003
Message from Ben Turner to Paul Twomey (VeriSign) 17 November 2003
Letter from Paul Twomey to Cary Karp (MuseDoma) 20 January 2004
Letter from Paul Twomey to Richard Tindal (NeuLevel) 29 July 2004 (PDF)
Letter from Paul Twomey to Geir Rasmussen (The Global Name Registry, Limited) 15 August 2004 (PDF)
ICANN Workshops and Presentations
ICANN has facilitated numerous workshops on IDN topics. Materials from these sessions are available here.
Presentation: International Domain Name Committee Report
28/30 October 2002 (Shanghai, China)
Presentation: IDN Authorization for TLDs with ICANN Agreements
26 March 2003 (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
Workshop: Internationalized Domain Names
21 July 2004 (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)
Workshop: Internationalized Domain Names
1 December 2004 (Cape Town, South Africa)
Workshop: Internationalized Domain Names
13 July 2005 (Luxembourg City, Luxembourg)
As the deployment of IDNs proceeds, ICANN expects that many issues will be circulated within the IDN discussion list and encourages as many interested registries as possible to contribute to these discussions.
IDN Discussion Registration and Instructions
Internationalized Domain Names Discussions Archives
Homograph domain name spoofing works by exploiting the visual resemblance, or near- resemblance, of certain characters and symbols. ICANN is concerned about the potential exacerbation of homograph domain name spoofing as IDNs become more widespread, and is equally concerned about the implementation of countermeasures that may unnecessarily restrict the use and availability of IDNs. ICANN's public comment forum on this topic is available here.
ICANN Statement on IDN Homograph Attacks and Request for Public Comment
gTLD Communique: Potential of IDN for malicious abuse
CENTR: Statement on homograph attacks
Click here to submit comments regarding IDN homographs
Click here to view comments regarding IDN homographs
RFC 3454 Preparation of Internationalized Strings ("string-prep")
RFC 3490 Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications
RFC 3491 Nameprep: A Stringprep Profile for Internationalized Domain Names
RFC 3492 Punycode: A Bootstring encoding of Unicode for Internationalized Domain Names in Applications
RFC 3743 Joint Engineering Team (JET) Guidelines for IDN Registration and Administration for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean