2002-10-31 - Internationalized Domain Names

Whereas, the Internationalized Domain Name Committee was established by resolution 01.94 to serve as a general coordination body for the work on policy issues related to Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs);

Whereas, the IDN Committee has issued a series of reports and recommendations regarding IDNs and related issues;

Whereas, earlier this month the Internet Engineering Steering Group approved the publication of three Proposed Standards defining an application-level mechanism for IDNs;

Whereas, technical analysis has shown that the IDN standards are not sufficient to limit collisions, confusion, and other potentially damaging side-effects stemming from the unrestrained potential to register IDNs using arbitrary characters available in the UNICODE encoding system;

Whereas, there remains a variety of other unresolved issues and potential problems associated with the use of IDN-based identifiers;

Whereas, deployment of IDNs before these issues are addressed raises serious operational and other concerns;

Whereas, under resolution 02.89, the IDN Committee is currently scheduled to formally terminate at the conclusion of the ICANN meeting in Shanghai;

Resolved [02.118] that the IDN Committee is continued until the conclusion of the 2002 ICANN annual meeting;

Resolved [02.119] that the President and the Chair of the IDN Committee are directed to prepare a proposed charter and list of members for a new committee to address IDN implementation issues, for presentation to the Board at the 2002 ICANN annual meeting.