Internationalized Domain Names - Getting them to work

Presented by Gihan Dias (University of Moratuwa) [bio]

Although domain names in non-Latin characters have been available for several years, it was only in October 2009 that ICANN announced that non-Latin top-level domains will be available.

Sri Lanka, like most other Asian countries, uses non-Latin scripts. Over the past few years, many websites have been created in our national languages - Sinhala and Tamil. We also need to access them using local-language URLs.

We explain how we decided on not only the top-level domains for our country, but also other domains, including names for organizations and services (for example, what is the string representing "www"?)

We also look at the issues in representing and keying strings in Indic languages, including issues in IDNA2003 that prevented the correct representation of some strings.

We describe our IDN registration policies and implications for name selection and phishing.