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Understanding Character Variants

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VeriSign's Character Variant Solution

Different thought leaders in the technical community have suggested different approaches to address the character variant issue. Each approach has both positive and negative aspects. The technical community does agree that the character variant issue can never fully be addressed because languages are always in a state of change. Hence, new character variants between languages will continue to be introduced into languages.

While working to address the issue of character variants, VeriSign has consulted and will continue to work with all interested stakeholders. These groups include China Network Information Center (CNNIC) (.cn), Taiwan Network Information Center (TWNIC) (.tw), National Internet Development Agency of Korea (.kr), Japan Registry Service (JPRS) (.jp), the Chinese Domain Name Consortium (CDNC), and the IDN Implementation Committee established by ICANN.

VeriSign has upgraded its IDN infrastructure to address character variants. The initial upgrade was designed to support character variants in Simplified and Traditional Chinese scripts. The upgrade was completed in three phases:

• Phase I: Character Variant Blocking
• Phase II: Language Tags
• Phase III: Language Tags Required