IDN regulation?

[llegent]

Anyone have been involed in international domain names? I have always wonder how is it possible for this type of domain to exist!:confused: Anyone have ideas as to how are they actually being regulated? Are they also under ICANN?? Any special rule for these type of domains?

Kind to share?

[zach]

I am not sure whether you are talking about country code domains or international domains. As far as I am aware, all domain names are under ICANN (with a few exceptions, such as those under Name.Space and other alternative networks.. but these are not universally accessable).

Country Code Domains:
There are over 200 country code domains (ccTLDs). Each country code domain is regulated by the country itself. For instance, .fr domains are regulated by france. Hence, each country has its own laws as to how domains should be used and by whom they can be registered.

Although some extensions are just not popular at all (such as .us, because it is often mis-interpreted within the united states that .com is American), many countries make good use of their extension. The most blatant examples are the UK (.co.uk) and france .fr and germany .de.

International Domains:
There are also international domains, and this might be what you mean. These are registered to institutions which operate across borders. The World Health Organisation owns http://www.who.int/. They can not be registered by individuals.

[llegent]

Thanks Zach for the information! This is the first time that I am aware of .int domain!

Beside this, what I was having queries are those domains with special character eg Arabic character domain, Chinese character domain...etc. Oh well, my browser couldn't even display the url correctly! So, are they being regulated under ICANN to? or under individual country?

[zach]

Oh sorry, I didn't realise that you meant that. IDNs are simply domains that use non-ascii characters. As for why they exist, they serve languages which use an extended character set, such as latin languages which usually use accents (à, é, è, î, etc.). It dosen't really make sense to leave out the accents when writing as they are actually a part of the word (and define the meaning and prononciation). So in order to include them in the Domain Name System, which is ascii based, a system was developed (IDNA) to allow them to be translated to ascii.

Besides their usefulness in helping to 'conform' the internet to non-english languages, IDNs also affords flexability to the Domain Name System by allowing for new symbols to be added (such as €.

One thing that I should probably add is that since you can mix scripts and character sets when forming a domain, a lot of IDN domains are used for spoofing. If you use Gmail and Paypal, you probably receive warnings that messages that appear to be from PayPal.com are not. This is because the sending is actually using "pаypal" with a cyrillic letter 'a' rather than a latin letter 'a', but they look the same.

Quote:are they also under ICANN??

yes.. and they are just like ordinary domains, except that they must first be translated in to ascii.