Recently in IDN Category

We'll be attending the upcoming DomainPulse event in Lucerne, Switzerland.

DomainPulse is the most important event for the German speaking domain industry, and is held each year in either Germany, Austria or Switzerland.

This year's agenda includes topics such as IDNs, DNSSEC, legal issues and internet governance.

It's also one of the few domain industry events that doesn't seem to have new TLDs on the agenda, so that's probably as good a reason as any to attend! (Only kidding!)

IDN domains (internationalised domain names) . It's a really horrible acronym, but once you get past that, the actual concept is a lot more interesting.

If you follow the technology press you'll have seen quite a lot of coverage of IDN domains in the last few weeks, as ICANN announced during the recent Seoul meeting that they'd launch them on 16th November 2009 (today).

The ICANN blog reports that they've already received 6 requests, representing 3 different languages. Reports coming in suggest that Egypt has expressed interest in launching an IDN in Arabic, Bulgaria is applying for a Cyrillic script one, Russia will have lodged an application for at least one as well (or are in the process of doing so..)

What does this mean?

For the moment it's hard to say, but the launch of IDN domain names is a step along the path towards a more multicultural and multilingual internet.

The more people who have access to the Internet then the better it will be for everyone ..

Related articles by Zemanta

• Putting The Accent Back Into Domains - IDNs In EU (blacknight.com)
• Egypt launches Arabic web domain (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Learning About CIS, Central and Eastern European Domains (blacknight.com)
• First Arabic domain name registration to begin shortly (thenextweb.com)

I'm just back from the ICANN meeting in Seoul, South Korea.

I had planned on posting with updates during the week, but, as you can see, that didn't happen.

Why?

Simply put - it was an incredibly busy meeting, both in general and for me personally.

I'm now back in Ireland struggling to get over jetlag and also trying to process all that happened over the course of the week.

If you've been following the mainstream media then you'll probably have heard about the big announcement regarding internationalised domain names ie. domains using non-Latin character sets.

But what else happened?

New TLDs, which ICANN made a big announcement about in Paris, are still delayed. Early in the week it became apparent that the delays were going to become longer and longer. ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom would not provide any concrete answers when asked about deadlines. However some light did appear at the end of the tunnel when the board met on Friday.

Other topics that were getting a lot of attention included DNSSEC and compliance.

On the DNSSEC side two things are obvious:

1. It's going to be introduced
2. Most registrars won't support it immediately or anytime soon

Compliance and more amendments to the registrar agreements with ICANN are "on the cards".

ICANN's compliance team are working hard on removing "bad actors", but there is still a lot of work to be done and there is a lot of pressure to make even more changes to the contracts. Whether all the changes people are asking for are really warranted or not is another matter entirely.

I'll cover the various topics separately in the coming days ....

As an internet business it is only natural that we would be concerned with the development of policies that affect our sector.

Earlier today ICANN's agreement with the US government came to an end. It has been replaced with a new document which paves the way for the future - a bright future which is truly global in nature.

As founder and Managing Director of Blacknight, which is also an ICANN accredited registrar, I welcome the signing of the new document - the Affirmation of Commitments. I welcome ICANN and the US Department of Commerce's commitment to a "multi-stakeholder, private sector led, bottom-up policy development model for DNS technical coordination that acts for the benefit of global Internet users".

This new document severes the close link between ICANN and the US government, while reinforcing and affirming the organisation's role in the development of a truly global organisation that will work in the public interest.

What many people may not realise is that the US government held, until earlier today, an overly important role in the governance and control of the internet. 

The JPA (Joint Project Agreement) did provide for government oversight of ICANN, however it was oversight by one government only - the US government.

While it is only natural that the US government would wish to have a degree of oversight of such an important resource, it is also fundamentally important that such oversight reflect the global nature of the internet.

The new document also strengthen the global and multi-cultural and multi-lingual facet of the internet.

The internet is far too important a resource to have been left in the hands of a single government or cultural ideology.

The recognition of the importance of IDNs underlines this very clearly.

With the wider introduction of non-Latin (ASCII) character sets into the DNS system people of all races, cultures and creeds will be in a much better position to truly participate in what has to be a global community.

We in Ireland are on the outer edges of Europe, but the Internet has allowed businesses, such as ours, to actively compete in global markets.

With the signing of this new agreement we look forward to policy development that reflects the diverse legal and cultural frameworks that need to interact and be respected within ICANN and internet policies.

We look forward to working with a stronger and more transparently accountable ICANN.

This step furthers the innovation and growth of a global internet.

We hope that with the post-JPA agreement in place ICANN, its staff and members of the ICANN community will now be able to focus their energies and resources on the introduction of new TLDs.
It is time for ICANN to "take the bull by the horns" and provide a concrete timeline for their introduction without further delay.