Aliaising is a matter of policy decisions. ICANN staff does not make decisions on policies. This is done in the bottom-up processes by supporting organizations and advisory comitteees to ensure that the broad community is the developing forces behind such decisions.

On the GNSO side, the policy for introduction of new gTLDs (incl IDN TLDs) is not yet finalized. So far though the GNSO IDN WG position was that being the operator for an exisiting TLD does not set precedence to becoming operator for translations or transliterations of the TLD. On the other hand the process for introduction of new gTLDs also includes a objection process for confusability, wich could come into play in relation to application for TLDs that can be considered translations or translietrations of exisiting TLDs.

On the ccNSO front the volunteers are working on two parallel processes. A formal policy development process currently working on the development of an issues report. And a fast-track process aiming at intorducing a limited number of IDN TLDs in the short term – the WG for this process is currently working on the initial report that contains the issues that are to be considered. As such there is yet not an answer to your question here either.

I understand it is an important question for domain name registrants – but the fact that we dont have an answer yet is not because we dont want to but simply that the process is not far enough underway.

I hope this helped clearing things up a bt?

Tina

And that means what? The elimination of .com; Dname to cryllic .kom from .com; or a whole new seperate namespace?

There can only be one of those and Icann seems not to want to address this. Will the namespace be seperate or aliased to the .com? It’s a simple question.

We in the IDN community thank you for all your IDN related work. It has been a real eye opener to me — after purchasing several IDN domains and seeing type in traffic from several countries. IE7 or Firefox must be kicking around in China, Thailand, Japan and Korea — because I am getting traffic from those countries. I think what you and the folks at ICANN are doing will improve commerce and communication throughout the world. IDN.IDN will improve the quality of life on the internet for Billions of people who now have to suffer because they don’t understand what they are typing in. Of course they do understand the meaning of .com and .net and .jp and .cn ect. So they will continue to use these extensions. By adding IDN.IDN to the current IDN.Ascii I think it will increase the use of both for the next several years.
By the way, I can type in at least 10 languages currently on my PC including Korean and Chinese. I just downloaded the language pack from microsoft and with a simple click can switch languages. It’s really fairly easy. So with a standard qwerty keyboard I have access to many IDN sites.
Once again thanks Tina for all you help and work in improving the future of the internet for the non-english (non-ascii) world.

Phio