Internationalising the dots
If web pages can be written in non-Latin alphabets, why can’t domain names be as well? Ari-Pekka Launne looks at the challenges of internationalising domain names.Domain names are normally combinations of ASCII characters. ASCII script replicates the 26 characters of the standard Latin alphabet and the numerals 0 to 9.
Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) are domain names that contain local languagespecific characters. Such domain names can contain letters or characters from non-ASCII scripts (for example, Arabic or Chinese). The Internet community continues its endeavours to make domain names available in character sets other than ASCII. In future, more and more people will be able to use the Internet fully in their own language.
The internationalising of domain names is not a task that can be completed by just a snap of the fingers. There are technical issues and political issues to overcome. It should also be noted that there are some negatives to the project.
So, an IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) is an Internet domain name that contains non- ASCII characters—in other words, characters that do not appear in the standard Latin alphabet. These include, for instance, standard Latin characters that have diacritics or accent marks, as well as characters from non-Latin alphabets.
When an IDN is used, there may be technical difficulties caused by non-compatible keyboard or browser settings—these are typically related to the local language used for the settings.
When you enter ‘café.com’ into your web browser, you would expect it to point to a website with the domain name cafe.com. But what about if you typed in hame.fi or häme.fi? Or vodka.ru or водка.ru, or even водка.рф?
The short answer is that these domain names, though similar looking, are not interchangeable and won’t point to the same website, unless set up to do so.
Internationalising domain names is not a new idea. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) set up a committee to study these issues. The committee gave its final report to the ICANN board on June 27, 2002. This was followed by several versions of draft guidelines and an online evaluation, designed to test the system using several different scripts. On November 16, 2009, internationalised country code top level domains (ccTLDs) were made available. In January 2010, the first four IDN ccTLDs (for Egypt, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) successfully passedthe evaluation. The introduction of ccTLDs will change the Internet completely and bring with it new IP-related challenges.
One of the problems with domain names is that good ones are hard to find—they all seem to be reserved already. A good domain name is short, easy to remember, and relates to the content of the website, the company name or a trademark. Sometimes it relates to the goods or services offered. If a domain name needs to be written using ASCII code only, it limits the number of available names. Allowing different characters, several new scripts and special letters opens up more possibilities for applicants. This seems like good news, but is it?
Given that information on the Internet appears in many different languages, it makes sense for domain names to follow suit.
When Internationalized Domain Names are used, technical solutions may be needed to facilitate communication between parties in different language groups. Keyboards may not contain the necessary letters and browsers may not work properly with them. For this reason, the Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority (FICORA) recommends that InternationalizedDomain Names are not registered as primary domain names.
There are about 6,000 languages in the world. Chinese is spoken by about 1.343 billion and English by 580 million people, while other languages have few speakers—for example, Skolt Sami is spoken by just 400 people. When writing for a specific audience, we need to use the characters of the respective language. All languages based on Latin script have letters in common, but some have letters with accents. These exist in French, Spanish, Hungarian, Polish and in all of the languages spoken in northern Europe, including Finnish, which will serve as an example.
Finland has allowed Internationalized Domain Names under .fi since 2005. The accepted characters include letters with accents from Finnish, Swedish and Sami.
Finnish, which is spoken by about 5.3 million people, is unlike any other language in Europe. There are eight vowels: a, e, i, o, u, y, ä and ö. Swedish å (equivalent to o) is also used. Including consonants, there are 29 letters required to write understandable Finnish.
One of the problems with the Internet lies in the fact that it is all about electricity: 1 and 0, on and off. All IP addresses are numbers, and IP numbers are hard to remember or search for, at least when you have lots of them. The solution has been to give the numbers corresponding names—domain names. Each domain name represents one or more related IP addresses—in this sense, they are unique.
Furthermore, one IP address can be reached through several domain names, if the holder has configured the computer to understand that it hosts, say, kolster.fi, kolster.com and kolster.eu.
Still, the ASCII code version of the domain name needs to be used no matter where in the world you are. The Internationalized Domain Names may look confusing when not written in ASCII.
FICORA’s WHOIS information (listing registrants of domain names) includes: hame.fi and häme.fi (xn--hme-qla.fi). The domain name in parentheses is the ASCII expression of the IDN häme.fi.
In some ways, the Internet actually complicates matters for Finns. This is mainly because of the use of ASCII code in messages and communications on the Internet. In principle, all computers understand this code.
So why do we find it difficult? In Finnish, the three letters that are not included in the standard ASCII code carry information that may changethe entire meaning of a message. For example, the Finnish word for a skirt is hame. There is also a district in Finland called Häme. So, when we tell our friends about the nice scenery, we may confuse the audience if the dots are not in the right place.
When the internationalising of a TLD begins, there is an important question of a possible grace period to allow the holders of the un-internationalised domain names to register the internationalised version as well. Does a domain name carry some intellectual property-related rights, in respect of confusing similarity, for example?
If domain name holders have the right to reserve the respective Internationalized Domain Name then, in reality, the number of domain names available does not grow any bigger. In this scenario, new domain names would become available only if the holders of the existing domain names decide that they do not want the internationalised versions.
The relationship between domain names and trademarks is a question that deserves a study all of its own. There are likely to be difficulties if we try to apply concepts from trademark law to domain name issues directly, just as there would be if we brought domain name regulations to bear on the world of trademarks. Would we be willing to accept the possibility of thousands of new bars for registering or using a trademark? Probably not. In short, at the moment, a domain name is not a bar or obstacle for the registration of a trademark. Even if someone has registered a domain name (or even several domain names with different extensions using the same word as in the trademark), the trademark can be registered and any objection of the domain name holder would be likely to be overruled. This could change, for example, if domain names were included in the Trade Marks Act. And this could result in many problems that are likely to shake traditional thinking in our line of business. Even so, trademarks cannot be completely put aside when discussing internationalising domain names.
Other problems include spoofing and phishing. People tend to be less careful when reading or writing a domain name or website address. Misspelling is already a problem with domain names, and the possibility of taking unfair advantage of misspellings only increases with internationalisation.
Comparing two marks may become more difficult after internationalisation. The practice is already to transliterate marks from foreign languages. Now we face this expanding to encompass the meaning of foreign words, and perhaps even the comparison of scripts.
There is broad recognition that IDNs are highly likely to help facilitate Internet use by the majority of the world’s population whose native scripts are non-Latin. But there are also a number of crucial technical and policy issues that are essential to ensure that IDNs can be deployed in a manner that does not harm the stability of the Internet. These issues need to be discussed further.
The biggest advantages may be that users of a specific language can use all of their own language’s characters when creating domain names. This is likely to make domain names more useful in the relevant area or language group. At the same time, this creates new, available domain names.
The biggest disadvantages concern criminal actions online, enabled or made easier by the internationalisation of domain names. No doubt users could grow suspicious of sites in foreign languages.
Internationalisation poses a huge technical challenge for Internet users as well as a number of challenges for IP professionals. These must and can be overcome, but it will require significant work.
Ari-Pekka Launne, LLM, is a European trademark attorney and manager at Kolster Oy Ab. He can be contacted at: ari-pekka.launne@kolster.fi
