Global by Design

In January of this year, ICANN announced that four fast-track IDNs had made it through linguistic approval — effectively clearing the way for commercialization.
Oddly missing from that list was China’s IDN.
One of the reasons ICANN initiated a fast-track process — if not the reason — was China.
China began putting pressure on ICANN a few years [...]

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Last month, Rod Beckstrom, President of ICANN, spoke at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Here’s the video. It’s a great introduction to how ICANN has evolved and where it’s headed. And, yes, Rod does talk about my favorite topic: IDNs!

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Seventeen countries have applied for IDNs so far, but we only know the details on four of them:

Saudi Arabia (SA): السعودية
Egypt (EG): مصر
United Arab Emirates (AE): امارات
Russian Federation (RU): рф

Yesterday, Bangladesh announced that it too had applied. Here is the domain the government selected:

বাংলা

There are 300 million Bangla speakers around the world who will potentially [...]

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ICANN shed some light on its fast-track application process today, announcing the first four countries to pass the string evaluation of the process.
Here they are:

Saudi Arabia (SA): السعودية
Egypt (EG): مصر
United Arab Emirates (AE): امارات
Russian Federation (RU): рф

I’m surprised to see China absent from this list. But there are 12 other requests behind these four.
I know [...]

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So who’s applied for IDNs so far?
According to ICANN, 10 applications (representing five languages) were submitted over the first four days.
ICANN won’t announce exactly who applied and for what until each application is successful — which pushes us well into 2010.
So I’ve had to turn to press reports from the registries to piece together the [...]

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