For two days, 5 and 6 February 2004, the city of Zurichstood at the heart of the German-speaking Internet. More than 150 participants attended the specialist conference, Domain pulse, which was organized jointly by the three registries, DENIC (for .de), nic.at (for .at) and SWITCH (for .ch and .li), and which dealt with topical issues and trends affecting domains and the further development of the Internet.

One of the main themes at the event was the introduction of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), thanks to which umlauts, accents and other diacritics are going to be possible in domains in future. The registration of IDNs is to commence in Germanyand Switzerlandon 1 March 2004 and in Austrian 31 March 2004. Each of the three registries has opted to add whole character sets to the characters permitted for domains. The Swiss have decided to implement the Latin-1 Supplement, which gives them an additional 31 letters. Austriais to use the ISO-8859-1 character set, giving it an additional 34 new letters. DENIC’s approach has been to go for a large-scale solution and it has converted all its systems to UTF-8, right through from its registration system to its website. Commenting on this costly, sophisticated measure, Sabine Dolderer, a member of DENIC’s board, stated: “fundamentally, we are now in a position to support any character set. To begin with, however, we are implementing the Latin-1 Supplement and Latin Extended-A character sets with a total of 92 new characters, covering all the European languages that use the Latin alphabet.”

Another topic that was discussed at length was the relationship between the state and the world of business in shaping and administering the Internet and also in international cooperation in this field. Speaking on behalf of the German government, Michael Leibrandt, from the federal ministry of economic affairs, stressed once again that DENIC is doing a good job in Germanyand that there is thus no need for any sort of change in the current situation.

Turning to the international administration of the Internet, ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), whose function is the technical coordination of the Internet, was once again the butt of vociferous criticism. Several speakers complained about the tendencies towards greater centralization and the influence the American government has over this body, which is regarded as excessive. Paul Verhoef, a newly-appointed ICANN vice-president and head of the organization’s recently-created Brusselsoffice, admitted that mistakes had been made. The new team at the top of ICANN, which, apart from him, includes the president, Paul Twomey, has set itself the target of eliminating those weaknesses that had been recognized and of fostering a new style of communication. The Dutchman, who only recently assumed office, called on the European registries, which have very frequently criticized ICANN in the past, to join in a dialogue and to work constructively together.

The next Domain pulse will be held in the first quarter of 2005 in Vienna.

Further information about Domain pulse (mainly in German), including the speakers’ presentations, is available at www.domainpulse.org.