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Wednesday, 23 September 2009

Internationalizing WHOIS

Whois is an Internet application (service) that discloses registration information associated with a domain name. Typically included in a Whois response are the sponsoring registrar (GoDaddy, Network Solutions, Mark Monitor, etc.), the names and contact information for the registrant and the domain’s web and technical administrators, and DNS configuration information. This information is publicly available for all generic Top Level Domains (com, net, org, info, biz, …).

Historically, registration information has been submitted and displayed using the US-ASCII7 character set. However, the characters that comprise the Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Japanese and other scripts cannot be displayed using US-ASCII7 but require that other character sets such as UNICODE-8, -16, and ISO-8859 be used. Internet applications such as email and web are increasingly sensitive to and accommodating of the fact that many if not the majority of Internet users write and type using characters from local scripts.

Whois must evolve to accommodate this internationalization and ideally should do so without creating a Babel effect. On behalf of the ICANN SSAC, I wrote a report laying out the issues relating to the need to internationalize Whois (SAC037). Recently, I gave a webinar on this topic. An MP3 recording and the webinar presentation are available if you want to learn more about the issues and what ICANN – and you – can do to identify a solution.

Posted at 09:54 AM in Domain names and DNS |

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