Earlier this month, DomainNameWire.com published an article about ICANN’s policy development process. The author, Andrew Allemann, strives for balance but overall leaves the impression that ICANN has “policy overload,” handling too many policy efforts at once. Andrew also cites the technical and complex topics we ask the public to comment upon. Since I was quoted [...]

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This past week was quite the historical change for the Internet with several additional languages moving forward in the IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process. Chinese: With one billion people around the world using Chinese as their primary language, it means that one out of every five people on the planet can have benefit from the [...]

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ICANN delegation visits Moscow, Russia May 12-14, 2010. A delegation from ICANN, headed by President and CEO Rod Beckstrom and including Barbara Clay, Tina Dam and Veni Markovski, was in Moscow on a 3-day visit, and participated actively in a number of events (in time order): – A meeting at the Institute for Information Security [...]

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شهد يوم الأربعاء 5 مايو 2010 إدراج أول ثلاثة أسماء نطاقات عليا دولية لرموز الدول في منطقة الجذر الخاصة بنظام أسماء النطاقات مما يعني أن تلك الأسماء يمكن استخدامها على الإنترنت.‏ الدول الثلاث التي تم إضافة رموزها الدولية في نفس اللحظة إلى منطقة الجذر هي: • المملكة العربية السعودية • جمهورية مصر العربية • دولة [...]

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The last week has been focused on historic IDN accomplishments and news: The first four IDN ccTLDs have been introduced and are all functioning. The corresponding countries are: United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Russian Federation, and Egypt. This essentially means that we have started seeing domain names where the top-level/extension is either: امارات. السعودية. .рф [...]

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Internationalized Domain Names and the usability of them is a key aspect of the ongoing introduction of IDN ccTLDs. ICANN is actively taking part in conferences and events, with a focus on applications and usability of new technology on the Internet. This is to spread information about IDNs and how they work in order to [...]

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Following yesterday’s big news [http://icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-05may10-en.htm] with the introduction of the first IDN ccTLDs we thought it was a good time to provide an update to where the Fast Track Process is. IDN ccTLDs in the DNS root zone: Egypt: مصر (Egypt) Saudi Arabia: السعودية (AlSaudiah) United Arab Emirates: امارات (Emarat) – in addition Russian Federation: [...]

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Today the first three production non-Latin top-level domains were placed in the DNS root zone. This means they are live! Here is one newly enabled domain with a functional website that works right now: وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر What you should be seeing is something like the following: It even works on a mobile phone: The three new [...]

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This is a very brief blog post with quite the big content. Last week was a special week at ICANN, with several IDN milestones meet. Many were included in the 22 April 2010 ICANN Board meeting. The ICANN Board approved the first IDN ccTLD delegation requests for four countries. These countries are: Egypt, the Russian [...]

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