Internet governance: key issues for the Asia Pacific

IETF: Internet evolution turbo facilitator
Xiaodong Lee

IETF is the abbreviation of Internet Engineering Task Force, but we may consider it as Internet Evolution Turbo Facilitator, most of the infrastructural standard of Internet is published by IETF, including TCP/IP, SMTP, SNMP, DNS and so on. Openness and Interoperability is the principles of IETF, except for company, but individual could contribute to IETF, and also to Internet community. With Nine years experiences in IETF, I am very happy to join the IETF activities, because I am very excited, when my proposal has been adopted by IETF and used by many Internet users. Every engineer with extreme passionate to contribute to IETF should take part in the IETF activities. Everyone could be a facilitator of Internet evolution!

An update on the latest IDN work at IETF
John Klensin

The initial version of the Standard for Internationalized Domain Name labels, published by the IETF in 2003, has worked well but several have problems appeared. This "exclusion" model has confused both users and registrants about what was actually valid and being registered. One of the consequences of the exclusion approach is that it essentially placed all responsibility for reasonable choices of rules about naming on the registries (including administrators for zones deep in the DNS tree). Some adopted a narrow and conservative view, others effectively decided to have no rules at all (or only those rules that were externally imposed). Those differences added to the confusion.

After publication of an IAB report on the issues, IDNA2008 was initiated in mid-2007 to recast things into an "inclusion" model. That effort matured to the point that an IETF Working Group was formed in the first quarter of 2008. There was a general assumption that the work would progress very quickly. While principles were established on which there was general (but not complete) agreement, the assumption was incorrect: it turned out that an inclusion-based approach is difficult, at least in part because there are very strong arguments for including some characters that would be prohibited by those principles, for excluding some that would be allowed, and for shaping very specific rules under which a few normally-prohibited characters could be allowed.

The work appears to finally be drawing to a successful conclusion. This talk will briefly review the history and concepts of IDNA2008 and then give a status report on the work and its likely consequences.

IDN activities at ICANN
Tina Dam

In this session ICANN staff will provide a status report on the progress of the implementation of the IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process and other IDN related topics. The IDN ccTLD Fast Track process is anticipated to launch by Q4 2009. Demo of how the process functions will be available and staff support functions for any IDN related question to the process or launch and implementations of IDNs in general is available as well.

Overview of IDN
James Seng

Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) is the technology that allows domain names to be in multiple scripts. This is a technology that originated in the Asia Pacific 10 years ago, with significant contributions from the Chinese, Japanese and Korean Internet community.

This presentation will give a background as well as a brief history of IDNs.

Handling variants and readiness
Lucy Wang

The characteristics of the Chinese language and the current codex of the Internet are incompatible in many respects and can lead to social inequity. This presentation outlines the strategies CDNC are formulating to handle the issue, including the provision of technical solutions. Through policy, market, and user research, and community coordination, CDNC hopes to provide practical and useful results that will result in development of technical infrastructure, and a support network.