Establishment of JGP has been approved by ICANN to develop the rules for Japanese gTLD labels

On 10 March 2015, establishment of JGP (Japanese Generation Panel) has been approved by ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). JGP is a panel to propose the rules for Japanese gTLD (generic Top Level Domain) to ICANN. It has Hiro Hotta from JPRS as its Chair and Akinori Maemura from JPNIC as its Vice-Chair. Eight IDN experts are its initial members.

Rules for gTLD labels

In the recent new gTLD program launched in January 2012, Non-ASCII strings, as well as ASCII strings, were allowed to be proposed as new gTLD names. A gTLD that has non-ASCII characters in its label string is called an IDN gTLD. 116 proposals among all 1930 proposals were for IDN gTLDs.

In the recent new gTLD program, proposed strings were assessed manually to decide whether the strings confuse the Internet users. For example, strings were assessed on the basis where visually similar or semantically similar strings may lead Internet users to confusion and coexistence of multiple mutually similar strings is inappropriate. For example, some thinks that coexistence of “.国語" and “.國語” as totally different TLDs leads to confusion.

Through the experience of the recent new gTLD program, ICANN drives a project that will come up with clearer rules about the appropriateness of the TLD strings. The project aims to develop such rules before the next round of new gTLD introduction. As a part of this project, it aims to develop the rules that can automatically decide the appropriateness of the proposed strings by defining the usable character sets and confusability measure as far as possible. The set of such rules is called as RootLGR (Root zone Label Generation Rules).

Structure of RootLGR development project and JGP

ICANN set up a project to develop RootLGR (*1) and defined the structure of the project (*2). And then it called for organizations that constitute the structure (*3). Such organizations began to work on development of LGR for a variety of languages and integration of the LGRs. The project structure consists of

• Generation Panel : a panel to develop an LGR for gTLDs in each language (one for each language)
• Integration Panel : a panel to unify all language LGRs into a single RootLGR

To enable the above structure, Japanese volunteers, who are IDN experts, gathered and started to develop Japanese LGR in August 2014. They also submitted a proposal for the formal establishment of Japanese Generation Panel (JGP) to ICANN on 6 February 2015. Now that ICANN approved the establishment of JGP on 10 March 2015, JGP will work as a panel that will eventually submit a Japanese LGR proposal to ICANN.

In addition to Japanese Generation Panel, Arabic, Chinese, and Armenian panels have been already established and pursue their mandates formally. In addition, some Generation Panels for other languages have started their effort for their LGR development and the preparation of the panel establishment.

Relationship between JGP and other language Generation Panels

In case of TLD labels, labels in various languages collocate in a single domain name space, i.e., root zone. For example, as “国語” is recognized either as a Chinese string or a Japanese string, TLD “.国語” cannot be known whether it’s a Chinese TLD or a Japanese TLD. Therefore a single LGR called RootLGR is needed as a ruleset to cover all the languages expressing TLDs. Especially, regarding Kanji (Han in Chinese and Hanja in Korean), three Generation Panels for Chinese, Japanese and Korean have to cooperate and collaborate in developing their respective LGRs that are consistent and unifiable with each other.

The way forward

JGP will work on developing Japanese LGR through cooperation with Chinese Generation Panel, Korean Generation Panel and Integration Panel. Currently it plans to finalize Japanese LGR development in summer 2015. Before finalization of the Japanese LGR, JGP plans that comments will be solicited on the draft version that is thought to be unifiable with Chinese LGR and Korean LGR. JGP currently consists of eight members, however additional member(s) may be added through its activities.

JGP publishes its activities on its web site http://j-gp.jp/ .

Questions will be directed to JGP secretariat through info@j-gp.jp .

References

(*1) Root Zone LGR Project
https://community.icann.org/display/croscomlgrprocedure/Root+Zone+LGR+Project

(*2) Procedure to Develop and Maintain the Label Generation Rules for the Root Zone in Respect of IDNA Labels
https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/lgr-procedure-20mar13-en.pdf

(*3) Call for Generation Panels to develop Root Zone Label Generation Rules
https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/call-for-panels-lgr-11jul13-en.pdf

(*4) Proposal for Generation Panel for Japanese Label Generation Rules for the Root Zone
http://j-gp.jp/%E8%A8%AD%E7%AB%8B%E6%8F%90%E6%A1%88%E6%9B%B8?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=JGP-proposal-submit.pdf

(*5) All Panels Status Update
https://community.icann.org/display/croscomlgrprocedure/All+Panels+Status+Updates