One topic that kept being misunderstood at the ICANN meeting in India was ‘what is the purpose of the IDN wiki’ – the example.test site that are actual IDN TLDs in the root. I’ll try to explain what is going on with the wiki and what it can and cannot be used for.

First some background and clarifying information. Having your script/language represented in the wiki is not a pre-requisite for eventually getting an IDN TLD in the root. These 11 languages/scripts are merely being used to evaluate usability of IDNs in applications. The “example.test” strings in the wiki were translated into the specified languages and then represented by the associated scripts.

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Dans un pays hôte où les langues et les scriptes sont si nombreux (22 langues officielles), personne ne sera étonné de voir les IDN occuper le devant de la scène. Ces noms internationalisés – comprenez des noms de domaine acceptant des caractères autres que le seul code ASCII, des accents français aux caractères mandarins en passant par le cyrillique et tout autre alphabet “exotique” – ont fait l’objet d’un atelier dès le lundi à New Delhi. Le sujet a déjà fait couler beaucoup d’encre et engendré de nombreux maux de têtes. Le défi : incorporer environ 100 000 de ces caractères venant des langues du monde entier dans le système de nommage, au niveau de l’extension.

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ICANN hears this question all the time at meetings, events, in different online forums, on the idn.icann.org wiki, and in emails and phone calls. The great challenge is it the answer isn’t the specific “as of this date” answer so many people want to hear. Because of the nature of some critical functions that still needs to be finalized, such as for example the policy process, we’re only able to provide an estimate.

Right now both the GNSO and the ccNSO are taking a look at how IDNs can be introduced or delegated at the top-level – how you can get, say, all-Arabic-cahracters after the dot in a domain name. ICANN have processes for delgation of ccTLDs and there have been a couple of rounds in the past years for introduction of new gTLDs, but none of these included IDN TLDs.

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It is very inconsiderate of five-sixths of the world to fail to speak English, but then we are reliably informed that they feel pretty much the same way.

And so while the Internet has done an extraordinary job of transcending physical borders, language remains a pretty significant issue if you want to actually communicate with your new online neighbour.

When it comes to ICANN’s work, this comes with an extra layer of complexity thanks to the fact that the vast majority of English speakers wouldn’t know what an English speaker was talking about when discussing many of the topics that concern ICANN on a day-to-day basis.

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Dans quelques jours se tiendra la première des trois réunions internationales de l’ICANN de l’année. Jetons un œil sur ce qui devraient être les principaux sujets de New Delhi.

Le JPA, un point clef pour l’avenir de l’ICANN, sera bien entendu au cœur des discussions. D’autant plus que la fin de la période d’appels à commentaires sur ce dossier coïncide avec la fin de la réunion de New Delhi.

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If there is one question or concern related to IDNs that have been asked continuously in the past year it has to be that of internationalizing versus localizing the domain name space. In other words, questions such as:

“Well, but I don’t have a keyboard that enables me to type in all these new characters, so I cannot type in these IDN addresses, why are you allowing this to happen?”

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Je suis à Prague depuis deux jours, pour assister à la troisième réunion organisée par l’ICANN pour ses registrars européens. Ces réunions furent lancées en 2005 à l’initiative de Tina Dam, alors en charge des relations avec les registres (aujourd’hui, Tina supervise le programme IDN de l’ICANN), et Tim Cole, qui s’occupe des registrars. La première a eu lieu en Belgique, à Bruxelles.

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The IDNwiki was released at 4.10am PDT 15 October 2007 (UTC – 7hours). Now, 6 weeks later, here are some updated user statistics and related information. As mentioned previously we will also provide a report that focuses on the initial results with the evaluation of fully localized domain names, as the wiki has been set [...]

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This is an update to the blog post at: http://blog.icann.org/?p=223#comments Page Requests and Users: After a week the total number of page requests served is: 128.267 Divided among the IDNwikis this is: Chinese/Chinese: 37.56% Cyrillic/Russian: 28.05% IDN Main gateway: 15.48% Arabic/Arabic: 4.67% Arabic/Persian: 2.93% Tamil/Tamil: 2.20% Hebrew/Yiddish: 2.03% Devanagari/Hindi: 1.03% Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana/Japanese: 1.78% Greek/Greek: [...]

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