2002-12-15 - IDN Committee

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, in October 2002 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 02.118, the IDN Committee was continued until the conclusion of the 2002 ICANN annual meeting;

Whereas, the President and the Chair of the IDN Committee were directed under that resolution 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;

Whereas, the President and the Chair of the IDN Committee have recommended that it would be in the best interests of ICANN to retain the membership and charter of the existing IDN Committee to focus on such other policy issues as may arise, but that the President in consultation with the Chair of the IDN Committee should form a new President's IDN Registry Implementation Committee composed of interested registries, registrars, and technical experts to consider and exchange information on ways to resolve the issues associated with implementation of IDN capabilities in existing top level domains;

Whereas, the President has agreed to form such a committee in consultation with the Chair of the IDN Committee;

Resolved [02.153] the Board continues the IDN Committee until the end of the 2004 annual meeting, or such time as the Chair informs the Board that the work of the IDN Committee is complete, whichever is earlier.