History of IDN
12/1996
Martin Duerst's original Internet Draft proposing UTF5 (the first incarnation of what is known today as ACE) - UTF-5 was first defined by Martin Duerst at the University of Zürich.
03/1998
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 (IDN Project team - Lim Juay Kwang and Leong Kok Yong) and subsequently continued under a team at Bioinformatrix Pte. Ltd. (BIX Pte. Ltd.) - a NUS spin-off company led by Prof. S. Subbiah.
07/1998
Geneva INET'98 conference with a BoF discussion on iDNS and APNG General Meeting and Working Group meeting.
07/1998
Asia Pacific Networking Group (APNG, now still in existence and distinct from a gathering known as APSTAR) iDNS Working Group formed.
10/1998
James Seng was recruited to lead further IDN development at BIX Pte. Ltd. by Prof. S. Subbiah.
02/1999
iDNS Testbed launched by BIX Pte. Ltd. under the auspicies of APNG with participation from CNNIC, JPNIC, KRNIC, TWNIC, THNIC, HKNIC and SGNIC led by James Seng.
02/1999
Presentation of Report on IDN at Joint APNG-APTLD meeting, at APRICOT'99
03/1999
Endorsement of the IDN Report at APNG General Meeting 1 March 1999.
06/1999
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.
07/1999
Tout, Walid R. (WALID Inc.) Filed IDNA patent application number US1999000358043 Method and system for internationalizing domain names. Published 2001-01-30
07/1999
Renewed 2000 Internet Draft on UTF5 by James Seng, Martin Duerst and Tan Tin Wee.
08/1999
APTLD and APNG form a working group to look into IDN issues chaired by Kilnam Chon.
10/1999
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.
11/1999
IETF IDN Birds-of-Feather in Washington was initiated by i-DNS.net at the request of IETF officials.
12/1999
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. Requires use of either plug-in or special DNS hacks.
Late 1999
Kilnam Chon initiates Task Force on IDNS which led to formation of MINC, the Multilingual Internet Names Consortium.
01/2000
IETF IDN Working Group formed chaired by James Seng and Marc Blanchet.
01/2000
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. Requires use of either plug-in or special DNS hacks.
02/2000
Multilingual Internet Names Consortium (MINC) Proposal BoF at IETF Adelaide.
03/2000
APRICOT 2000 Multilingual DNS session
04/2000
WALID Inc. (with IDNA patent pending application 6182148) started Registration & Resolving Multilingual Domain Names.
05/2000
Interoperability Testing WG, MINC meeting. San Francisco, chaired by Bill Manning and Y.Yoneya 12 May 2000.
06/2000
Inaugural Launch of the Multilingual Internet Names Consortium (MINC) in Seoul to drive the collaborative roll-out of IDN starting from the Asia Pacific.
07/2000
Joint Engineering TaskForce (JET) initiated in Yokohama to study technical issues led by JPNIC (K.Konishi)
07/2000
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.
03/2001
ICANN Board IDN Working Group formed
07/2001
Japanese Domain Name Association: JDNA Lauch Ceremony (July 13, 2001) in Tokyo, Japan.
07/2001
Urdu Internet Names System (July 28, 2001) in Islamabad, Pakistan, Organized Jointly by SDNP and MINC.
07/2001
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.
08/2001
MINC presentation and outreach at the Asia Pacific Advanced Network annual conference, Penang, Malaysia 20th August 2001
10/2001
Joint MINC-CDNC Meeting in Beijing 18-20 October 2001
11/2001
ICANN IDN Committee formed
12/2001
Joint ITU-WIPO Symposium on Multilingual Domain Names organized in association with MINC, 6-7 Dec 2001, International Conference Center, and Geneva.
01/2003
Free implementation of String Prep, Punycode, and IDNA release in GNU Libidn.
03/2003
Publication of RFC 3454, RFC 3490, RFC 3491 and RFC 3492.
06/2003
Publication of ICANN IDN Guidelines for registries Adopted by .cn, .info, .jp, .org, and .tw registries.
05/2004
Publication of RFC 3743, Joint Engineering Team (JET) Guidelines for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) Registration and Administration for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean
03/2005
First Study Group 17 of ITU-T meeting on Internationalized Domain Names
05/2005
.IN ccTLD (India) creates expert IDN Working Group to create solutions for 22 official languages
04/2006
ITU Study Group 17 meeting in Korea gave final approval to the Question on Internationalized Domain Names
06/2006
Workshop on IDN at ICANN meeting at Marrakech, Morocco
11/06
ICANN GNSO IDN Working Group created to discuss policy implications of IDN TLDs. Ram Mohan elected Chair of the IDN Working Group.
12/2006
ICANN meeting at São Paulo discusses status of lab tests of IDNs within the root.
01/2007
Tamil and Malayalam variant table work completed by India's C-DAC and Afilias.
03/2007
ICANN GNSO IDN Working Group completes works, Ram Mohan presents report at ICANN Lisboa meeting.