The IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process was successfully launched, as planned on 16 November 2009. It was done at exactly 00:00UTC with a very joyful count-down by the Fast Track Staff Team – followed by a wooohooo
The launch went smoothly. We have since monitored the system and everything is working.
As of 10pm Pacific [...]

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As we (at ICANN staff) have been preparing for the Fast Track launch, for tomorrow, it was suggested to me that I write a blog post about it. I could have written about all the hard work, the long hours, the aggressive testing of the online system, keeping it simple and yet flexible for all [...]

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If you are a regular ICANN community member, it is likely you are currently feeling overwhelmed by the amount of material that has appeared in the past week. So here is a quick guide to help make sense of it all.
Sections are:

JPA/Affirmation
Applicant Guidebook/new gTLDs
Fast Track/IDNs
Public comment periods
Seoul meeting
And the remainder

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At the joint meeting of ICANN’s advisory committees and supporting organizations in Sydney, a number of core issues and corresponding possible solutions were discussed and pulled into a summary document.
We have put that document out in a radically different public comment period to allow for as much community discussion and collaboration as possible.
The comment [...]

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Variant top-level domains (TLDs) and how they are managed is one of the most hotly discussed topics we are facing at the moment. What are variant TLDs, you ask? Well, that’s where the discussion begins…
ICANN’s staff is currently producing implementation plans for both the IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process and the New gTLD Process. What [...]

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One particularly important aspect of ICANN’s launch of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) will be the availability of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) at the top level. That eagerly anticipated enhancement to Internet participation has also raised some issues.
For example, current practice dictates that gTLDs contain at least three characters – two-character Latin TLDs are [...]

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Some IPv4 /8s have been used to number IP networks in an unofficial and improper way. That is, they have been used without being properly allocated and registered in a public Whois database. In most cases these networks are mostly private, used internally in their organization, and so the addresses are not seen in the Internet’s routing system. The organizations using these addresses have relied on the overall availability of IPv4 addresses so that there was no pressing need to allocate all of the /8s that IANA manages. With the decreasing IANA free pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses, it is now clear that every last one of them will ultimately be allocated to the RIRs.

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In managing the root zone, recently we clarified some of the technical conformance criteria for the name servers top-level domain operators use. Before we put the adjusted criteria in place, we did some research to find out real world compliance against some of the metrics.
One of the more interesting insights involved looking at network diversity. [...]

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As part of my job at ICANN… I have to read a lot of news clips. This morning, one headline in particular caught my eye: “Domain changes coming”. It was from Reuters and started: “Two thirds of businesses are unaware they will be able to use their own name in place of domain extensions [...]

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