Summary

  • ARIN's suggestion 2013.2 asked to allow accented characters in Customer names. Its 26 February 2013 response deferred the issue until the IETF had a workable Whois successor; ARIN's live suggestion index still labels it On hold.
  • ARIN operated RDAP by 2015 and called it UTF-8 based in a 2025 presentation. Its current Reg-RWS documentation still limits XML payloads to ASCII, except for accented characters in certain free-form comments.

A small request with a very long queue

Thomas St.Pierre's 14 February 2013 suggestion contained no grand theory of Internet governance. He wanted a Customer name to carry the letters used in languages beyond English. His example listed the characters permitted at the time: Latin letters without accents, digits and a short punctuation set. He called the restriction sad even by 2013 standards. The request was marked immediate.

ARIN's answer twelve days later located the difficulty somewhere else. Internationalized registration, it said, was straightforward. Search and retrieval across legacy ASCII Whois were harder. The IETF's WEIRDS group was working on a replacement, and ARIN said it would revisit the question once a reasonable standard was underway. The ticket stayed open, with its status set to On hold and its update date fixed at 26 February 2013.

The promised standards event happened. In ARIN's own June 2015 account, the IETF had published the RDAP RFCs that March, and ARIN was already operating both an RDAP directory service and bootstrap. A 2025 ARIN directory-services presentation makes the contrast explicit: Port 43 Whois has no internationalization support; RDAP is UTF-8 based and internationally supported. ARIN's current RDAP guide directs users to that query service.

Yet the current suggestion index still carries 2013.2 among active items. It repeats the dependency on IETF internationalization and Whois compatibility. The individual page has no later decision. A standard that arrived eleven years ago is still described as a future condition on the public board.

The write door is a separate door

RDAP answers queries. It does not submit Customer records. That distinction matters more than any anniversary. ARIN's Reg-RWS payload documentation says XML payloads support ASCII only. It carves out accented UTF-8 letters for free-form comments in selected payloads, but the Customer payload has a separate customerName field. The published instructions do not describe a matching exception for that field.

The public material does not include a current authenticated attempt to submit an accented Customer name through every ARIN interface. Such a result, or a dated ARIN field-by-field implementation note, would settle what the product actually accepts today. The narrower conclusion is already uncomfortable: ARIN has a UTF-8 capable reading protocol, an ASCII-only published write interface, and a public suggestion still waiting on the old protocol excuse.