In early 2009, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) plans to adopt the update for international domain names (IDN) discussed since the beginning of this year. This became evident in the talks at the developers’ meeting in Minneapolis this week. One of the new entries on the list of characters allowed for domains that don’t use the ASCII character set will be the German “eszet” or “scharfes S” character (”ß”), which has been excluded from the IDN standards (RFC3490, RFC3492) until now. It won’t make an immediate difference for German internet users, though – domains containing an eszet will continue to replace it with ss. Marcos Sanz, who represents the German internet registrar DeNIC in the IETF’s IDN working groups, said in Minneapolis that DeNIC welcomes the additional possibility. He said, however, DeNIC has so far not decided how and when to make use of this new registration option. Sanz said it is important to consider that many users rely on the current mapping rules and state their contact addresses with the ß character accordingly.

Up until the last moment, there were discussions ....

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