IDNs in Norway

1

• IDNs in Norway
• ccTLD-meeting in Rome 2004
• Hilde Thunem

2
Domain name policy IDNs under .no

• Only characters in written languages that has
  official status as Norwegian languages allowed
• The letters a-z, numbers 0-9 and -
• The special Norwegian characters æøå
• In addition
• Bokmål and nynorsk (Norwegian language council)
• à, ç, è, é, ê, ñ, ò, ó, ô, ü, ä
• Sámi (Sámi council)
• Northern Sámi á, c, d, ?, š, t, ž
• Southern Sámi none
• Lule Sámi á and n
• Personal names (The Norwegian register of names)
• ä, é, è, ô, ö and ü
• No bundles it was felt that for Norwegian
  languages this would create more rather than less
  confusion
• Accents are used to change the meaning of certain
  words
• IP-rights Møller and Möller are not the same

3
Transition mechanism for .no Draw lots

• No sunrise, and no special rights for holders of
  prior registrations
• 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
• 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)

4
The transition

• 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.

5
Applications received during the transition week
6
Statistics and trends

• 43173 domain name applications received during
  the transition week
• 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

7
Living with IDNs

• 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

8
Living with IDNs

• 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/id
  n_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

9
More information

• The Norwegian IDN policy
• www.norid.no/regelverk/forslag/idn-2003/index.en.h
  tml
• www.norid.no/
• Hilde.Thunem_at_uninett.no