Stephane Van Gelder

ICANN has released a draft plan for implementing its Add Grace Period (AGP) limits policy.

The policy is designed to end domain tasting. Registrars will no longer be able to claim refunds on domains less than 5 days old if the claim is for 50 domains or more than 10% of the registrar's monthly registration volume, whichever is the highest.

The draft implementation plan lists the AGP limits start-date as March 1, 2009.

As the AGP's reason for being in the first place was to enable registrars to deal with payment defaults, and not as a means of gaming the domain name registration system through domain tasting, ICANN has chosen not to do away with it altogether. Registrars can claim exemption from the AGP limits provided they are able to justify them. Exemption is only granted for the request made. There is no blanket exemption possibility which would in effect allow a registrar to "opt-out" of AGP limits.

Will this work, i.e. will it make domain tasting a thing of the past? ICANN will monitor the new policy for two years and then report on its effectiveness to the GNSO. Changes to the policy may at that point be considered.

Imagine that your domain name, currently unknown outside of your immediate circle of customers and friends, suddenly became THE byword in a presidential debate watched by the entire planet.

That's exactly what happened to JoeThePlumber.com owner Joe Francis. During the third Obama/McCain debate, both candidates mentioned "Joe The Plumber" a total of 26 times. The little frequented website suddenly saw its number of hits explode… And buy offers soon started pouring in. Francis is said to have received a top offer of $900,000 for his domain!

But the canny neighbourhood plumber isn't selling just yet. He first wants to look into marketing and licensing possibilities now that "Joe The Plumber, Friendliest Plumber in Town" is fast becoming America's catchphrase. T-shirts are already been sold on the JoeThePlumber.com website. Soon, the Joe The Plumber brand may become a fully-fledged franchise…

EURid is technically ready to implement IDNs in a relatively short timeframe in .EU. However, there is still a certain amount of administrative work to be done, including several meetings with the European Commission.

One of the issues still to be finalised is the list of names that member states will request be reserved and not made available for general registration.

European registrants can therefore expect to see IDNs become available in .EU sometime next year.

Regular readers will know that I am a proud member of EURid's Requirements Panel (RP). In fact, I'm writing this on the train back from EURid's Brussels headquarters where the 5th meeting of this group, set up to help provide EURid with registrar input on improving their domain management systems and processes, was held.

In addition to the RP, EURid now has a second registrar group to work with. On October 8, the Registrar Advisory Board (RAB) had its first meeting. Nine registrar representatives serve on this RAB, the main function of which is to provide EURid's board with advice on its long-term business decisions. The RAB is very much a "supporting organisation" in the ICANN sense of the phrase, just like the GNSO for example exists to advise the ICANN board on issues and policies relating to the generic TLD namespace.

So where the RP will focus on practical implementation issues, the RAB will consider more long-term strategic decisions.

Last week, ICANN announced that it had added two new languages to its IDN testbed. Bengali and Khmer have thus become scripts number 16 and 17 to be supported as part of ICANN's global IDN experiment.

ICANN is testing IDN TLDs, i.e. a complete domain name written in a non-ASCII format. The Greek IDN test link (http://παράδειγμα.δοκιμή) serves as a good example: not only is the domain name (the left part after the dot) written in Greek, but so is the extension (the right part before the dot).

I see some irony in ICANN pushing its IDN testbed while at the same time, ccTLD managers are finding it harder and harder to decide what to do with IDNs. In July, the Belgium registry DnsBE announced that, having consulted the community, it had decided not to go ahead with an IDN implementation at this time.

And last week, at an AFNIC meeting, I learned that IDNs were not included in the French registry's action plan for 2009. That means no IDNs for .FR before 2010 at the earliest.

Admittedly, several European registries, including the Germans, the Swiss and the Austrians, have already launched IDNs. But I can't help thinking that IDNs are creating as many problems as they are solving, and that is why registries are having trouble implementing them. We can only hope that ICANN's current experimentation will lead to a simpler, more intuitive IDN system. That would increase the chances for widespread IDN adoption.

Unfortunately, there's some doubt cast on that as well. I was at a Eurolinc meeting last week (an organisation that promotes multilingualism on the Internet) and IDNs were discussed by technical people who know a lot more about them than I do. The consensus seemed to be that the current IDNA protocol, upon which ICANN's testbed is based and which relies on a form of coding called punycode to translate IDNs into ASCII-compatible data, is problematic. One suggestion I heard: dump punycode and use only UTF8 coding. A practical solution? I don't know to be honest, but it's nice to see people working an alternative ideas to make IDNs happen.

The French registry AFNIC sent out a press release late last week to highlight its new partnership with GS1 France, the local chapter of a global network of more than a million companies whose aim is to promote technological standardisation.

GS1 is at the forefront of ONS, the Object Naming System often dubbed "the Internet of things" which uses RFID tags to label products. AFNIC and GS1 France have already started working together on the European ONS root.

While all this ONS talk is fascinating, the real point of interest for me here is the reason why AFNIC is branching out in this way. While obviously linked to DNS, ONS is a different kettle of fish. The reason AFNIC is getting into it is simple: the French registry is giving itself options and planning for the future.

AFNIC is still waiting on the French government to put the management of the French namespace out to tender (expect some kind of announcement early next year). Until that happens, its position as the .FR registry will remain, if not precarious, at least possibly unsafe. So AFNIC General manager Mathieu Weill is exploring new avenues and making sure that the expertise AFNIC has developed over the years is used for other things besides domain names.

A wise business decision I think. Even if some may ask if a not-for-profit registry should be run as a business…