In 2001, MINC announced an initiative to carry out an Interoperability Testing of the many solutions for Internationalised Domain Names (IDN) currently offered by its members and others. At that time, the Interoperability Testing was contingent on the publication of Internet standards on IDN by the IDN Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
As of last week, the Internet Engineering Steering Group IESG has announced the publication of proposed IETF standards in IDN. Having had more than a year of background work on Interoperability Testing, until now being placed on hold, MINC is ideally positioned to coordinate an orderly deployment of IDN through the first step of determining conformance to IETF standards via its Interoperability Testing.
At the Second meeting (2002/2003 session) of the new MINC Board, including six new recently elected board members, MINC passed a resolution to approve the Interoperability Testing process, and to endorse the expeditious execution of this testing process to ensure that the many solutions offered by vendors and providers of IDNs currently in the market not only conform to the standards, but can also fully interoperate with each other. This is essential for the proper delivery of reliable and robust IDN services to the user community.
