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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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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This blog post is primarily intended to update the many people in the technical community and ccTLD community about activities related to Synchronized IDN ccTLDs. As you may know, one of the ICANN Board resolutions from the recent ICANN meeting in Nairobi directed staff to develop an extension to the Fast Track Process: a mechanism [...]

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Since the launch of the Fast Track Process, ICANN has received many questions about how the DNS Stability Panel will determine a confusingly similar string; that is, a requested string that is confusing similar with an existing ccTLD, gTLD or applied-for TLDs. The overall rules seem clear: 1) If you apply for an IDN ccTLD [...]

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One area of the IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process about which questions have arisen is community support for the IDN ccTLD and how such support can be demonstrated. I have provided some clarification here that I hope is helpful to present and future IDN ccTLD Fast Track participants. None of this information replaces or changes [...]

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IDN TLDs: pre-registrations, declined requests, and other misconceptions Recent statements and speculations have been made concerning the IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process and related issues. People seem to be most concerned about: • ICANN denying some countries/territories access to the Fast Track Process • ICANN approving IDN ccTLDs • The notion of pre-registrations in new [...]

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The first four IDN ccTLD requests has just been announced as having completed the String Evaulation portion of the Fast Track Process. These are associated with: Egypt, the Russian Federation, United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. See the full announcement here: http://icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-21jan10-en.htm So what does that mean? It means that these may now initiate the [...]

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