Joint ITU/WIPO Symposium

Creating a wider understanding of the complex issues surrounding the implementation of multilingual domain names

The last Plenipotentiary Conference of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), held in Minneapolis in 1998, decided that ITU should “take an active part in the international discussion and initiatives on the management of Internet domain names and addresses”.

On 6 and 7 December 2001, ITU and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) jointly hosted a Symposium on Multilingual Domain Names at Geneva’s International Conference Centre in association with the Multilingual Internet Names Consortium (MINC) — a non-profit non-governmental organization focusing on the promotion of multilingualisation of Internet names.

The Internet has become a global network of more than 230 connected economies and over 360 million users. It is estimated that by 2003, two-thirds of all Internet users will be non-English speakers, with the greatest expansion coming from Asia and Latin America. It is further estimated that by that same year, at least one-third of Web users will prefer to conduct their on-line activities in a language other than English, and that by 2005 only one third of Internet businesses will use English for on-line communication. Some forecasters even predict that, by 2007, Chinese will be the primary language used on the World Wide Web!

This joint ITU/WIPO symposium was vital for an international dialogue to address the evolution of the multilingual domain names. Some 200 participants from the Internet and legal communities, as well as policy-makers and government representatives reviewed the technical, legal and policy issues relating to the enlargement of the domain name space to support scripts of languages other than “Roman” characters.

A domain name, whether under a generic top-level domain like .com or a country code top-level domain like .fr or .us, provides a global presence which ensures that the corresponding on-line address is accessible online from anywhere. More than 100 million such names are estimated to be already stored in the Internet domain name system (DNS).

However, the language and scripts upon which the DNS is based have not changed to reflect the Net’s global character. The DNS mapping technology has always functioned using only a subset of Latin or “Roman” characters most commonly used to write English.

“Native speakers of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Tamil, Thai and other languages are at a disadvantage. The global nature of the Internet makes international dialogue critical if a universal solution to the problem is to be found,” said Roberto Blois, ITU Deputy Secretary-General, at the symposium’s opening ceremony.

Several initiatives are under way to explore the means by which the DNS can be internationalized to overcome the functional limitation of this naming and addressing system. In particular, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been actively attempting to specify standards for internationalized access to domain names.

As is often the case, market demand does not wait for technically perfect solutions. Already, a number of commercial and private organizations have proposed solutions that would enable multilingual domain name use, but de facto or technical standards that would guarantee interoperability have yet to emerge. Current implementations of multilingual domain names typically rely on proprietary technology or incomplete technical specifications. Will new emerging naming technologies not based on the DNS, such as keywords, become a preferred solution? Or will hybrid technologies merging the DNS and keywords surface?

There are many more questions than answers. The result is a risk of confusion in the marketplace among Internet users and providers. Mr Blois declared: “We do not want to run the risk of fracturing access to the Internet and as a result increase the digital divide between developed and developing nations.” Francis Gurry, Assistant Director General of WIPO said: “The Internet has achieved its remarkable success largely as a result of the fact that all users can access the same Internet from any location in the world, and any development should give priority to preserving this uniformity and stability.”

It was clear from the symposium discussions that the challenges are complex and go far beyond technical considerations including, inter alia, administrative arrangements for multilingual domains, competition policy, market access, intellectual property and dispute resolution mechanisms, as well as cultural and social issues. Many of these issues are discussed in the ITU and WIPO Briefing Papers dealing with, respectively, “Technology and Policy Aspects and “Internationalized Domain Names — Intellectual Property Considerations” (see www.itu.int/mdns).

“Equality of access to the valuable resources provided by the Internet is an issue of critical importance to the international community, and is a key concern for international intergovernmental organizations, such as ITU and WIPO. Also, while expansion of the domain name space means greater opportunities for legitimate users, it also opens up new opportunities for cybersquatters. We are keen on ensuring that the expansion does not happen at the expense of any one party,” Mr Gurry observed.

A bit of history…

An early effort to develop multilingual domain names started in Asia in the late 1990s, where consumer demand is said to be growing strong. Multilingual domain names were first developed at the National University of Singapore. In July 1998, a working group on Internationalization of the DNS was formed within the Asia Pacific Networking Group (APNG) in a bid to coordinate the evolution of multilingual domain names. One of the group’s projects was to develop the experimental implementation of an Internationalized Multilingual Multiscript Domain Names Service (iDNS).

Governmental, academic and industry entities from China, Hong Kong, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand participated in the iDNS project. Another project, called iDomain, had the objective of creating an iDNS test bed in Asia-Pacific countries.

In August 1998, a multilingual domain name system was demonstrated to delegates at an International Forum on the White Paper meeting in Singapore. By the end of that year, several countries and economies including China, Hong Kong, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Singapore and Thailand had expressed an interest in implementing such a system.

At the end of 1999, several companies (including a commercial spin-off of the Asia Pacific iDNS initiative called iDNS.net International Inc.) began to commercialize the technology that had been developed. By 2000, several test beds had been deployed around the world to offer multilingual domain names.

By 2001 a number of organizations had been established to fill what was believed to be a policy vacuum, and are now actively pursuing the deployment of multilingual domain names. These are: MINC, the Arabic Internet Names Consortium (AINC), the Chinese Domain Name Consortium (CDNC), the International Forum for IT in Tamil (INFITT) and the Japanese Domain Names Association (JDNA).

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) formally started its activities on multilingual domain names following a meeting in March 2001, where it established an internal Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) Working Group comprising four of its Board Members. After a “fact finding mission”, this working group reported its findings to a September 2001 meeting of the ICANN Board. Its report indicated that there was great demand for multilingual domain names. Based on these findings, the ICANN Board adopted a resolution which recognizes that “it is important that the Internet evolve to be more accessible to those who do not use the ASCII-character set” and stresses that “the internationalization of the Internet domain name system must be accomplished through standards that are open, non-proprietary, and fully compatible with the Internet’s existing end-to-end model and that preserve the globally unique naming in a universally resolvable public space”.

Intellectual property issues in a multilingual world

Looking at the challenges which intellectual property holders and administrators face on a daily basis in protecting trademarks, symposium experts in intellectual property and Internet technology shared experiences that may lead to a greater understanding of the issues raised by an increasingly internationalized domain name space. Key among those issues is the critical challenge faced by enterprises in protecting their intellectual property in a multilingual world, both on and offline, and the need for effective dispute resolution to resolve the domain name conflicts that will inevitably arise.

WIPO’s Briefing Paper explains that intellectual property and identifiers, such as trademarks and trade names, play an important role in commerce in both physical and virtual worlds. “In both these environments, such intellectual property identifiers, as well as new identifiers such as domain names, are valuable in distinguishing products and services from others offered by competing enterprises. The growing trend towards globalization and the increase in world trade have accelerated the internationalization of the intellectual property system and heightened the importance of such identifiers.” This trend is furthered by the advent of e-commerce in an on-line environment, for the role that such identifiers play in developing consumer awareness and trust towards brands that are newly emerging and lack the conventional bricks and mortar foundations.

Another WIPO report states that the “problem of conflicting trademarks across different languages and different language scripts is a problem that is already well known to the trademark community, which has a long experience with trademark registrations being effected in the various languages and language scripts used around the world. It is expected, however, that the introduction of internationalized domain names will introduce added dimensions to the problem of conflicting identifiers across different languages and language scripts.” These new dimensions may include evaluating the importance of phonetic similarity in the context of a largely visual or textual medium, the speed and relatively low cost with which a domain name registration can be obtained; compared to the time and cost associated with obtaining trademark registrations.

The joint ITU/WIPO symposium was a first step in bringing about a wider understanding of the many complex issues surrounding the implementation of multilingual Internet names. Mr Gurry says: “We welcome an orderly expansion of the domain name system which more accurately reflects the linguistic diversity of the offline world and is done in a way that preserves the rights of intellectual property owners.”