Member Article

ICC Paper on Internationalised Domain Names

The International Chamber of Commerce has published a paper on international domain names (IDNs). The paper highlights the potential issues arising if countries such as China carry through with proposals to create their own domain name systems.IDNs are those that use characters other than the standard letters a-z, numbers 0-9 and the hyphen. The system is administered by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, who have been working on creating an international system, but countries such as China, Russia and Brazil have become increasingly frustrated with lack of progress in this area.The ICC paper warns that plans to operate outside the traditional internet protocol address system could destabilise the internet. To ensure seamless and universal access to the internet the ICC stresses the need to maintain a global centralised system and makes recommendations to deal with the technical and logistical difficulties arising from implementing an all-inclusive international domain name system.If you have any queries related to this or any other IT or intellectual property issues, please contact Colin Hewitt at colin.Hewitt@wardhadaway.com

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .