Internationalized Domain Name

Timeline

1996-12: Martin Dürst's original Internet Draft proposing UTF5 (the first example of what is known today as an ASCII-compatible encoding (ACE)) – UTF-5 was first defined by Martin Dürst at the University of Zürich
1998-03: Early Research on IDN at National University of Singapore (NUS), Center for Internet Research (formerly Internet Research and Development Unit – IRDU) led by Prof. Tan Tin Wee (T.W.Tan) (IDN Project team – Tan Juay Kwang and Leong Kok Yong) and subsequently continued under a team at Bioinformatrix Pte. Ltd. (BIX Pte. Ltd.) – an NUS spin-off company led by Prof. S. Subbiah.
1998-07: Geneva INET'98 conference with a BoF discussion on iDNS and APNG General Meeting and Working Group meeting.
1998-07: Asia Pacific Networking Group (APNG, now still in existence and distinct from a gathering known as APSTAR) iDNS Working Group formed.
1998-10: James Seng, a former student of Tan Tin Wee at Sheares Hall, NUS, and student researcher at Technet and IRDU, Computer Centre, NUS, was recruited by CEO S. Subbiah to lead further IDN development at BIX Pte. Ltd.
1999-02: iDNS Testbed launched by BIX Pte. Ltd. under the auspices of APNG with participation from CNNIC, JPNIC, KRNIC, TWNIC, THNIC, HKNIC and SGNIC led by James Seng
1999-02: Presentation of Report on IDN at Joint APNG-APTLD meeting, at APRICOT'99
1999-03: Endorsement of the IDN Report at APNG General Meeting 1 March 1999.
1999-06: Grant application by APNG jointly with the Centre for Internet Research (CIR), National University of Singapore, to the International Development Research Center (IDRC), a Canadian Government funded international organisation to work on IDN for IPv6. This APNG Project was funded under the Pan Asia R&D Grant administered on behalf of IDRC by the Canadian Committee on Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS). Principal Investigator: Tan Tin Wee of National University of Singapore.
1999-07 Tout, Walid R. (WALID Inc.) Filed IDNA patent application number US1999000358043 Method and system for internationalizing domain names. Published 2001-01-30
1999-07: Internet Draft on UTF5 by James Seng, Martin Dürst and Tan Tin Wee. Renewed 2000.
1999-08: APTLD and APNG forms a working group to look into IDN issues chaired by Kilnam Chon.
1999-10: BIX Pte. Ltd. and National University of Singapore together with New York Venture Capital investors, General Atlantic Partners, spun off the IDN effort into 2 new Singapore companies – i-DNS.net International Inc. and i-Email.net Pte. Ltd. that created the first commercial implementation of an IDN Solution for both domain names and IDN email addresses respectively.
1999-11: IETF IDN Birds-of-Feather in Washington was initiated by i-DNS.net at the request of IETF officials.
1999-12: i-DNS.net InternationalPte. Ltd. launched the first commercial IDN. It was in Taiwan and in Chinese characters under the top-level IDN TLD ".gongsi" (meaning loosely ".com") with endorsement by the Minister of Communications of Taiwan and some major Taiwanese ISPs with reports of over 200 000 names sold in a week in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, China, Australia and USA.
Late 1999: Kilnam Chon initiates Task Force on IDNS which led to formation of MINC, the Multilingual Internet Names Consortium.
2000-01: IETF IDN Working Group formed chaired by James Seng and Marc Blanchet
2000-01: The second ever commercial IDN launch was IDN TLDs in the Tamil Language, corresponding to .com, .net, .org, and .edu. These were launched in India with IT Ministry support by i-DNS.net International.
2000-02: Multilingual Internet Names Consortium(MINC) Proposal BoF at IETF Adelaide.
2000-03: APRICOT 2000 Multilingual DNS session.
2000-04: WALID Inc. (with IDNA patent pending application 6182148) started Registration & Resolving Multilingual Domain Names.
2000-05: Interoperability Testing WG, MINC meeting. San Francisco, chaired by Bill Manning and Y. Yoneya 12 May 2000.
2000-06: Inaugural Launch of the Multilingual Internet Names Consortium (MINC) in Seoul to drive the collaborative roll-out of IDN starting from the Asia Pacific.
2000-07: Joint Engineering TaskForce (JET) initiated in Yokohama to study technical issues led by JPNIC (K.Konishi)
2000-07: Official Formation of CDNC Chinese Domain Name Consortium to resolve issues related to and to deploy Han Character domain names, founded by CNNIC, TWNIC, HKNIC and MONIC in May 2000.
2001-03: ICANN Board IDN Working Group formed
2001-07: Japanese Domain Name Association : JDNA Launch Ceremony (July 13, 2001) in Tokyo, Japan.
2001-07: Urdu Internet Names System (July 28, 2001) in Islamabad, Pakistan, Organised Jointly by SDNP and MINC.
2001-07: Presentation on IDN to the Committee Meeting of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Academies USA (JULY 11–13, 2001) at University of California School of Information Management and Systems, Berkeley, CA.
2001-08: MINC presentation and outreach at the Asia Pacific Advanced Network annual conference, Penang, Malaysia 20 August 2001
2001-10: Joint MINC-CDNC Meeting in Beijing 18–20 October 2001
2001-11: ICANN IDN Committee formed
2001-12: Joint ITU-WIPO Symposium on Multilingual Domain Names organised in association with MINC, 6–7 Dec 2001, International Conference Center, Geneva.
2003-01: Free implementation of StringPrep, Punycode, and IDNA release in GNU Libidn.
2003-03: Publication of RFC 3454, RFC 3490, RFC 3491 and RFC 3492
2003-06: Publication of ICANN IDN Guidelines for registries Adopted by .cn, .info, .jp, .org, and .tw registries.
2004-05: Publication of RFC 3743, Joint Engineering Team (JET) Guidelines for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) Registration and Administration for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean
2005-03: First Study Group 17 of ITU-T meeting on Internationalized Domain Names.
2005-05: .IN ccTLD (India) creates expert IDN Working Group to create solutions for 22 official languages
2006-04: ITU Study Group 17 meeting in Korea gave final approval to the Question on Internationalized Domain Names.
2006-06: Workshop on IDN at ICANN meeting at Marrakech, Morocco
2006-11: ICANN GNSO IDN Working Group created to discuss policy implications of IDN TLDs. Ram Mohan elected Chair of the IDN Working Group.
2006-12: ICANN meeting at São Paulo discusses status of lab tests of IDNs within the root.
2007-01: Tamil and Malayalam variant table work completed by India's C-DAC and Afilias
2007-03: ICANN GNSO IDN Working Group completes work, Ram Mohan presents report at ICANN Lisboa meeting.
2007-10: Eleven IDNA top-level domains were added to the root nameservers in order to evaluate the use of IDNA at the top level of the DNS.
2008-01: ICANN: Successful Evaluations of .test IDN TLDs
2008-04: IETF IDNAbis WG chaired by Vint Cerf continues the work to update IDNA
2008-06: ICANN board votes to develop final fast-track implementation proposal for a limited number of IDN ccTLDS.
2008-10: ICANN Seeks Interest in IDN ccTLD Fast-Track Process
2009-09: ICANN puts IDN ccTLD proposal on agenda for Seoul meeting in October 2009
2009-10: ICANN approves the registration of IDN names in the root of the DNS through the IDN ccTLD Fast-Track process at its meeting in Seoul, Oct. 26–30, 2009.
2010-01: ICANN announces that Egypt, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates were the first countries to have passed the Fast Track String Evaluation within the IDN ccTLD domain application process.
2010-05: The first implementations go live. They are the ccTLDs in the Arabic alphabet for Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
2010-08: The IETF publishes the updated "IDNA2008" specifications as RFC 5890 - 5894