Internationalized Domain Names or IDNs are back in the news. ICANN recently released a document entitled \"Proposed Final Implementation for IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process.\" It consists of a detailed discussion—59 pages worth—of ICANN\'s proposed criteria to administer requests for internationalized country code top level domains (ccTLDs) from countries listed in ISO 3166-1, plus the European Union. In a nutshell, ICANN has now offered a path toward authorizing the adoption of ccTLDs in many countries\' native languages. This marks a welcome advance for millions of Internet users who do not speak English or who do not use another language covered by ASCII. But with this advance comes some concerns. ICANN\'s proposal raises serious questions that must be resolved before IDNs are authorized by ICANN in the gTLD space. Let me explain.
Changing the characters in a domain name changes the domain name. Spoofers have long exploited this principle to create misleading websites, such as the one who cleverly registered a site under the domain name \"paypal.com\" but substituted a lower-case \"?\" from the Cyrillic alphabet in place of the normal ASCII \"a.\" This trick redirects web traffic to mimicked sites for the purpose of defrauding users.
Introducing IDN gTLDs could create duplicate websites, too. Consider a Hindi version of the domain name \"amazon.com.\" Second level domain names already can be transliterated into non-ASCII characters. A Hindi version of the site can appear as ???????.com. That is, the domain name appears in Hindi characters followed by the familiar ASCII form of \".com.\" After IDN gTLDs are rolled out the entire domain name would be transliterated as ???????. ??? ??. This change certainly would be more convenient for Hindi speakers, who would no longer have to shift from Hindi to ASCII text when typing in the domain name. But doing so also could create a new website. Introducing IDN gTLDs could create, in effect, two websites purporting to be \"amazon.com.\"
This duplication of websites presents at least three serious problems.
Internet users will be confused and almost certainly frustrated as they attempt to navigate among websites that are no longer what they appear to be. Navigating to the IDN version of \"amazon.com\" could offer a marketplace for books and music and electronics, or it might offer something else entirely, from propaganda to pornography. Rather than having a uniform experience on the Internet, customers will have widely divergent experiences, even when trying to navigate to the same website, depending on where they access the Internet. Introducing IDN gTLDs will then have the perverse effect of discouraging Internet use, rather than expanding it.
Website owners will suffer injuries to their intellectual property. Trademarks like \"amazon.com\" or \"nike.com,\" in which millions of dollars have been invested, will be diluted and tainted as customers in places as far-flung as Bangalore and Beijing navigate to the new IDNs, only to find that they are not dealing with the trademark owners or are dealing with them through a middle man. Consumer trust could be irreparably eroded.
Governments could use the transition to IDN gTLDs to seize control of local portions of the Internet to censor content. Blogs and articles critical of the government would be impossible to find if the government controlled websites at the registry level. Such a consequence would be a serious blow to the Internet as a tool of free inquiry and communication. Setting a precedent for the first time that a government may censor Internet content at the registry level can be expected to make censorship more widespread.
Introducing IDN gTLDs could fragment the Internet even further. Local IDNs have already been introduced, which has caused problems with interoperability and stability. Unless ICANN unifies the Internet under a single set of standards, the transition to IDNs could fragment the Internet even more seriously. A single, interoperable, international Internet will give way to an archipelago of local networks. The safety and stability of the entire DNS will be threatened in ways that are difficult to predict.
Avoiding these problems in the move to IDN gTLDs needs to be a priority. One suggestion is for ICANN to allow TLD registrars to reserve IDN gTLDs for current registrants in all available linguistic character sets. \"Amazon.com\" would then be reserved in every available language for the current registrants. Managing IDN gTLDs under a single standard will avoid the problems I have described. Registrars should be permitted to charge a registrant only when a new IDN gTLD is activated. Reserving the IDN space should cost nothing. In this way IDN gTLDs can be introduced without undermining the Internet\'s power as a means of communication, a forum of ideas, and a global marketplace.
Written by R. Shawn Gunnarson, Attorney at Law, Kirton & McConkie
