The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has officially created a group which is tasked to hasten the process for developing internationalized domain names (IDNs).

Vint Cerf, during his final meeting as ICANN chairman, said: “The introduction of IDNs is absolutely one of the most important changes to the domain name space since its inception. It’s taken many years to get to the point where there is confidence that we understand how to do this.”

ICANN started technical tests of IDNs last month on top-level domains in 11 languages ,which included Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil. However, there are still critical issues in relatiion to IDNs that need to be addressed and the newly formed group is tasked with finding interim procedures that would apply to country-specific domains.

If all goes according to plan, the non-English-speaking nations could begin using their own scripts for top level domain names by mid-2008, new chairman of ICANN, New Zealand lawyer, Peter Dengate Thrush said.

Currently ICANN uses the lists of the International Organization for Standardization in assigning country-specific domains in English. ICANN wants to have a comparable list for assigning country-specific domains in other languages.

Thrush, who was elected unopposed as ICANN’s new chairman last Friday, says fast-tracking the Internationalized Domain Names process will be one of his first challenges heading up the ICANN, M-Net writes.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 9:03 pm under Technology.

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