Non-ASCII Character Domains

Non-ASCII character domains are domains having characters, phrases or words that include local or native languages such as French, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Korean, German etc. ASCII or the American Standard Code for Information Interchange includes English alphabets and special symbols like hyphens, brackets, hash, colon, slash, $, < >, %, etc. All other non English characters in the form of text, number or symbols are classified as non-ASCII characters. The characters may be in the form of diacritical marks or small signs as of Greek or Latin scripts; mostly used in European languages. Or they may be special characters like Chinese or Japanese scripts.

Domain Name System (DNS) is responsible for linking text-based domain names to IP addresses and its service was initially confined to English and ASCII characters only. But now, non-ASCII character domains are capable of being registered using a process called Punycode.

The process of assigning a number of domain names worldwide is otherwise called multi lingual domain registration. The mission to assign non-ASCII character domains are vested with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or ICANN. Not all characters but only those that are legally approved by the domain name assigning authority are allowed for registration. Such names should also be supported by the DNS name servers. Non-ASCII domains were introduced by ICANN with the aim of providing global access to Internet applications for people who don't make use of the ASCII characters. Thus non-ASCII character domains are mostly demanded by non English speaking people all over the world.

Non-ASCII character domain is also known as internationalized domain or IDN that uses characters or letters comprising non-ASCII elements. An example of non-ASCII domain is the kanji domain that uses local characters of Japan instead of the usual alpha numeric ASCII characters.

There are several non-ICANN approved registries that provide non-ASCII domain registration to generic top level domains like .com, .org, .net, .info etc. They also provide country code registration with non-ASCII characters. Surveys reveal that half the world's Internet users come under non-English groups that use non-ASCII character domains.