Project Leader: Dr Tan Tin Wee, Chairman, APNG
Other Project Members: James Seng, Bioinformatrix Pte Ltd, Singapore
Leong Kok Yong, Tan Juay Kwang, National University of Singapore
WH Choi, KAIST and Lee SeungMin, J J Na, KRNIC, Korea
Agnes Lee and Mathias Koerber, SGNIC, Singapore
Mao Wei, CNNIC, China
JPNIC, Japan
Wu Kuo Wei, TWNIC, Taiwan
Project ID: APNG8-CC2
Date of Commission: 24th July 1998
Date of Completion: 28th February 1999
Date of Endorsement of Final Report: 1 March 1999
Project Tracked by: Chairman, APNG (apng-sec@apng.org)

Asia Pacific Networking Group
Chairman's Commission
on
Internationalization of DNS

History

The Chairman's Commission arose from the idea by the Chairman of APNG himself to create multilingual and multiscript functionality for the current Domain Names System which is presently restricted to monocase 7bit ASCII English language alphabets and a few punctuation marks. Starting from April 1998, the idea was refined and a pilot project implemented at the former Internet Research and Development Unit, National University of Singapore (now upgraded as Centre for Internet Research - CIR) where the Chairman was the head of unit.

A working prototype was created by software engineers Leong Kok Yong and Tan Juay Kwang, based on this idea, using the concept of a proxy DNS server to get around the problem of compromising current DNS operations. This was demonstrably workable, and work was initiated to tackle a more extensive implementation and a widespread testbed.

In July 1998, the Chairman created an APNG Chairman's Commission to rapidly look into setting up an Asia Pacific development team to create a more robust multilingual domain name server - iDNS, and to implement a multilingual domain name space - iDOMAIN as an international testbed.

From August to December 1998, the Chairman visited Hong Kong, India, Korea and China, demonstrating the pre-prototype system and managed to gather international interest in this project. Country NICs and ccTLD holders who have expressed interest as of Dec 1998 include Singapore, Thailand, China, HongKong, Korea and Japan.

At the IFWP August meeting in Singapore, the system was demonstrated to various international delegates to the meeting, who were discussing the issues surrounding the new IANA, including those from InterNIC and from the IETF.

In December 1998, the Chairman managed to recruit the participation of an industry partner, Bioinformatrix Pte Ltd (BIX Pte Ltd), as an early pioneer entrant, willing to risk being an early player and to sponsor servers and technical expertise.

Meanwhile, a grant application by APNG jointly with the CIR, to the International Development Research Center (IDRC), a Canadian Governement funded international organisation, met with success. This APNG Project is expected to be funded under the Pan Asia R&D Grant administered on behalf of IDRC by the Canadian Committee on Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS).

To discuss the issues surrounding the nomenclature of multilingual domain names, APNG is partnering the spin-off group APTLD (Asia Pacific Top Level Domain forum) to look into the iNAME component of the project.

Findings of the Commission

  1. The current DNS system does not meet the needs of non-English speaking Internet constituents. It forces non-English speaking internet users to learn English as a pre-requisite before the Internet becomes accessible to them. While this may be realistic and acceptable if the Internet were still confined to the research and academic community, the widespread adoption of Internet is currently hindered by the lack of ability of the current domain name system to support multilingual and multiscript features or Unicode.
  2. Owing to the fact that many Asian languages are currently adopting non-Unicode standards that suffer from overlapping codepoint and lack of facility to define the type of encoding used, the ambiguity caused has often been cited as an important reason why it is not a good idea for the current DNS to be internationalized.
  3. Localization problems is also cited as another reason why even if the DNS system were able to support an internationalization standard eg Unicode, very few users would be able to use it since each locale would need heavy duty changes to applications to make the whole system work.
  4. This combination of internationalization and localization problems hence causes a serious chicken-and-egg situation. Any solution has to deal both problems simultaneously.
  5. The commission also found that other than sporadic and uncoordinated attempts to provide multilingual functionality to the DNS, no comprehensive study or system has been proposed.
  6. Further, the commission found that there is an excellent and well thought out Internet Draft proposed by Martin Dürst (currently with the World Wide Web Consortium - W3C) which supports the internationalization of the DNS and outlines the framework for its implementation.
  7. By creating a pre-prototype system (iDNS - see below) that supports the proposed DNS internationalization standard together with a capability to handle localization problems, the commission has proven that a real solution is possible.
  8. The commission also finds that besides the need to provision for multilingual multiscript domain names, that there are concurrent needs to be able to render domain name associated addresses such as email address, URLs etc in multilingual scripts.
  9. In the implementation of any such multilingual domain name space, the current single monopolistic ownership of various levels of Start of Authority (SOA) needs to be relooked to offer the technical, management and administrative bases for multiple registrarship and/or registryship of an SOA, e.g. TLD, 2LD or even 3LD level. Although currently locked in a difficult impasse, administrative and management solutions to multiple SOAs still poses a major challenge. With a technical solution, such a process of de-monopolisation will be more easily implementatable.
  10. Finally, the commission concludes that based on an informal non-quantitative survey of key countries in the region, there are signs of a strong demand for the DNS system to support multilingual scripts. Serious effort should be made to provide a de-monopolised technical solution towards a truly internationalised multilingual and multiscript domain name system that will meet the needs of all peoples of the world.

Recommendations of the Commission

As a consequence of the findings described above, the Commission recommends:

  1. that in view of the fact that Internationalization of the DNS system both possible and feasible, that APNG, in conjunction with other Internet stakeholders such as APTLD, country code TLDs and national NICs, non-governmental or quasi-governmental organisations such as IDRC and other interested industry participants, should actively coordinate and pursue the establishment of an internationalized DNS throughout the entire Internet community, so as to provide a much needed service to the non-English speaking communities of the world;

  2. that the technical issues of refining a globally acceptable, backward compatible and future-proof solution to the internationalization of the DNS should be actively researched in cooperation with groups such as the World Wide Web Consortium, Unicode Consortium, etc;

  3. that the political issues of naming conventions in each language immediately points to a distributed mode of administration of a global internationalized multilingual next generation DNS;

  4. that any test internationalized next generation DNS should interoperate with the current domain name space and that mechanisms should be instituted within the current DNS framework to allow for testbed platforms such as this to be facilitated rather than worked around;

  5. that any global implementation of the iDNS name space should take into consideration the current shortcomings of the existing domain name administration, and should take adminstrative, management and/or technical measures to avoid these problems which may or may not be directly related to the Internatinalization/localisation of the DNS system. An example of this would be the current inability to handle multiple Starts of Authority (SOA).

  6. that the APNG and its associated organisations, having taken the lead, should continue to take the initiative in setting up the following component projects so as to pursue the goal of internationalization of the domain name system as an Asia Pacific contribution to the global Internet community.

Component Projects Recommended by the Commission

  1. iDNS
    Internationalized Multilingual Multiscript Domain Names Service (iDNS)
    Joint APNG-CIR Project


  2. iDNS for 6Bone
    iDNS for IPv6 addresses


  3. iDomain
    Testbed Implementation of iDNS
    Joint Collaboration of APNG and participating ccTLD/NICs and any interested industry players


  4. iNAME
    Multilingual naming issues - iNAME WG of APTLD
    Liaison with the iNAME working group of APTLD on the issues relevant to multilingual domain names, and the development of conventions in multilingual multiscript domain names system and a rallying point for other regional groups in the world to participate in the technical process of achieve conventions in nomenclature of Internet domains

Chairman's Commission

This project is commissioned by the 3rd APNG Chairman, Dr Tan Tin Wee with the consent and consensus of the APNG Executive Committee members and the APNG Board of Advisors, with the concurrence of the APNG open membership.


Date of Initial Commission: 24th July 1998, Geneva
Date of Commission Report 3rd Draft: February 1999, Singapore
Date of Commission Report 2nd Draft: January 1999, Singapore
Date of Commission Report Draft: December 1998, Singapore
Date of Presentation of Report: 28 February 1999, Singapore, during the joint APNG-APTLD meeting, at APRICOT'99
Presentation of Report 5-7pm, 28 Feb 1999 Program schedule
Powerpoint presentation
Date of Endorsement: This Report was endorsed on 28 Feb and on 1 March 1999 at the general meeting of the APNG. The Commission's recommendation was accepted and the Commission closed. Pursuant to the recommendations of the commission, there will be action taken to form the necessary working groups.