Universal Acceptance: APNIC system readiness, by Byron Ellacott. A presentation given at the APNIC 40 Cooperation SIG session on Wed, 9 Sep 2015.

1. Universal Acceptance:
APNIC system readiness
Byron Ellacott
Senior Software Architect

2. Universal Acceptance for APNIC
• Support for longer top level domain names
• Support for Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs)
• Support for Email Addresses Internationalisation (EAIs)
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3. APNIC system gap analysis: scope
• Determine readiness of APNIC systems to support
Universal Acceptance
• Identify gaps in readiness
• Assess work required and any roadblocks to full support
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4. External systems: E-mail
• Can we send/receive EAI mail?
– No.
• Limited or missing support in vendor software
• Vendors have indicated EAI support is of low importance
• But we can send and receive mail to IDNs encoded into
ASCII
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5. External systems: WHOIS
• Current implementation is based on older standards
– RFC 2822 email addresses, RFC 1128 domain labels
• Poor character set support in WHOIS
– None at all in the protocol!
• Front-end tools could alter IDNs to ASCII for WHOIS
– And some query tools could convert ASCII IDNs to UNICODE
• Supporting EAI means changing syntax and search rules
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6. External systems: MyAPNIC
• MyAPNIC deals with many E-mail addresses
– Login IDs, contacts, resource lists, tickets
• Reverse DNS tools
– Should convert IDNs to ASCII for DNS updates
• Member details
– Member organisation homepage URL
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7. Internal systems: ARMS
• Similar set of E-mail addresses to MyAPNIC
• Tools for managing WHOIS records
• Database configuration for MySQL to support UTF8
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8. Next steps for UA at APNIC
• Ensure IDNs are supported effectively
• Ensure EAI addresses are not mangled on input
• Determine best way to support UA in WHOIS
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