ICANN considers fast track for some international TLDs

By Tim Conneally, BetaNews

February 5, 2008, 11:18 AM

ICANN has proposed a schedule for the fast-tracking of non-contentious IDN ccTLDs that would allow for new non-Latin Alphabet top-level domains as early as Summer '08.

An internationalized domain name (IDN) will take a Country Code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD), or the ".country" name, and allow it to be displayed in non-ASCII characters. This will open the the current ISO 3166-1 standard of domain naming to beyond the 37 current characters. Countries not on the QWERTY or DVORAK keyboard standard have demanded this ability for a long time.

ICANN began testing IDNs in Fall 2006, which included inserting test names in 11 languages -- Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil -- in the root servers which translate to ".example," ".test," and ".hippopotamus." Test results were announced in the Spring of 2007, and "no impact could be detected."

The fast-tracking of these domain names, according to ICANN chairman Dengate Thrush, falls in line with the IPv6 upgrade which, in part, the group began yesterday.