Consistency is key to Internet stability, integrity and security

The International Chamber of Commerce today warned that designs by China and other countries to create their own domain name systems in Letters Digits Hyphen (LDH) for locating data on the Internet exposes the Internet to new risks that could destabilize it if technical and logistical issues are not urgently addressed.

In cooperation with its member companies around the world, ICC published a seven-page report today explaining the issues and stressing the consequences if the Internet is not made more accessible in other languages in a manner that ensures its flexibility, stability and global interoperability.

ICC said that a central global registry is crucial to ensure seamless universal access and to expand Internet use, especially in the developing world.

China, Russia and Brazil are considering assigning their own domain names to the
numbered Internet Protocol addresses as a political counterweight to the U.S. Memorandum of Understanding with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Since the inception of the Internet, ICANN has been the central authority fulfilling this role.

ICC does not favour the management of Internet addresses by a variety of entities since it would result in an uncoordinated, conflicting and fractured Internet. Instead, ICC supports ICANN and the continued use of UNICODE, a globally uniform encoding system used to assign domain names to the numbered Internet Protocol addresses. UNICODE is continuously expanding to include the characters of more languages….

One global system is critical for other reasons as well. For example, further upgrade, maintenance and resolution of disputes regarding IDNs must proceed in a globally consistent way.

"Unless this process is carefully and centrally implemented, domain names may lead to fragmentation and threaten the stability, integrity and security of the Internet," said Talal Abu-Ghazaleh, chair of ICC's Commission on E-business, IT and Telecoms (EBITT), which published its paper on internationalized domain names today….

This article is excerpted from a news release issued by the International Chamber of Commerce on 7 July 2006.