Transcript Document

IDNs in Norway
ccTLD-meeting in Rome 2004
Hilde Thunem
Domain name policy – IDNs under .no
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Only characters in written languages that has official status as Norwegian languages
allowed
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The letters a-z, numbers 0-9 and The special Norwegian characters æøå
In addition:
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Bokmål and nynorsk (Norwegian language council)
• à, ç, è, é, ê, ñ, ò, ó, ô, ü, ä
Sámi (Sámi council)
• Northern Sámi: á, č, đ, ŋ, š, ŧ, ž
• Southern Sámi: none
• Lule Sámi: á and ń
Personal names (The Norwegian register of names)
• ä, é, è, ô, ö and ü
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No bundles – it was felt that for Norwegian languages this would create more
rather than less confusion
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Accents are used to change the meaning of certain words
IP-rights: Møller and Möller are not the same
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Transition mechanism for .no: Draw lots
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No sunrise, and no special rights for holders of prior registrations
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According to the domain name policy, registering a domain name does
not give the holder any new rights that he did not already have
Equal chances for everyone
Procedural strengths:
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The registry may return wrong applications, and if there is still time the registrar can
correct them and send them in again before the drawing commences
Duplicate applications are eliminated, so that applicants need not go to lots of different
registrars and fill up their capacity
More robust for temporary technical problems at the registry or registrars
It worked once… (at the liberalization of .no)
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The transition
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Friday february 6th, 4 pm the registration system is closed in preparation for the transition to
a new policy.
Monday february 9th, 10 am the transition is started. Applications for internationalized
domain names are received, checked and put in a lottery que, while ordinary applications are
processed as normal.
Friday february 13th, 4 pm the registry closes the reception of all applications. Duplicates,
where the same organizaton applied for the same name, are removed.
Monday february 16th the Norwegian Post- and telecommunication Authority arranges a
lottery where the order of the applications is randomly decided for the cases where more than
one applicant has applied for a domain. The registry then processes the applications according
to the order decided by the lottery.
Wednesday february 18th, 10 am the registry system is opened for applications under the new
domain name policy. All applications are processed on a first come first served basis.
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Applications received during the transition week
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Statistics and trends
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43173 domain name applications received during the transition week
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11732 of these do not participate in the lottery (some because the application is for an ASCII
domain name, the majority because they contains errors)
983 duplicates
30458 applications participate in the lottery
5083 domain names applied for, 3383 (67%) of these have only one applicant
Very few domain names in the Sami languages registered – and only with a limited set of the
characters actually used (so far)
Most of the domain names with more than one applicant are generic, where there is no
trademark rights or other rights
A few disputes has shown up after the transition (as expected) but the alternative dispute
resolution body are treating these
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Living with IDNs
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The .no domain name policy state that there are two versions of a domain
name, an ACE-version (which is what will be entered in DNS) and a
domain version. Both versions of the name must fulfil all requirements in
the policy
 Maximum and minimum length of name
 Entered on the contract with the registrant (along with the registrant
statement that he does not infringe on other peoples rights)
Whois:
 Web-interface shows both versions
 Command line interface sends Latin-1 as default, but will send UTF8
if asked for
The registry prints both versions on invoices
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Living with IDNs
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Registry customer support does not speak the Sami languages, but as all
Sami also speaks Norwegian this will probably not be a problem. In
addition the website www.norid.no/domeneregistrering/idn/idn_nyetegn.html lists the
characters along with their names, as a help when spelling something over
telephone
”But it does not work....” No matter how much information you have given
the registrants in beforehand you have to be prepared to deal with this
question
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More information
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The Norwegian IDN policy
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www.norid.no/regelverk/forslag/idn-2003/index.en.html
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www.norid.no/
[email protected]