1. Introduction

The Internet is international.

With the international Internet follows an absolute requirement to interchange data in a multiplicity of languages, which in turn utilize a bewildering number of characters.

This document is the current policies being applied by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) towards the standardization efforts in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in order to help Internet protocols fulfill these requirements.

The document is very much based upon the recommendations of the IAB Character Set Workshop of February 29-March 1, 1996, which is documented in RFC 2130 [WR]. This document attempts to be concise, explicit and clear; people wanting more background are encouraged to read RFC 2130.

The document uses the terms 'MUST', 'SHOULD' and 'MAY', and their negatives, in the way described in [RFC 2119]. In this case, 'the specification' as used by RFC 2119 refers to the processing of protocols being submitted to the IETF standards process.