IDN ccTLD Fast Track
On 21st Jan, ICANN announced that 4 IDN ccTLDs Fast Track request has pass the String Evaluation. The 4 IDN ccTLDs are Egypt, the Russian Federation, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. After the announcement come out, there was a strong reaction, particularly from the Asian community.
Specifically, the Asian community was puzzled why China and Taiwan are not part of the Fast Track. Rod Beckstorm paid a courtesy visit to China on 2nd Mar and during which some of the questions was answered. Unfortunately, the situation with .CHINA and .TAIWAN remains in limbo but hopefully one should see some results in the coming months.
ALAC Statement IDN ccTLD, IDN Variants and IDN 3 Characters
On 19th Mar, I started preparing an ALAC Statement on the IDN ccTLD, IDN Variants and IDN 3 Characters statement. This should have been started early. I apologies for the oversight.
IETF IDNAbis Working Group
On 16th Mar, Vint Cerf (chair of the IDNAbis WG) announced to the mailing list, thus concluding the WG as follows:
Ladies and Gentlemen of the IDNABIS Working Group, as you see from this notice, the last working group document that was not yet forwarded by the AD has been declared "dead" after it proved impossible to find a version that could be forwarded to the IESG that satisfied the preferences of the editors, the chair of IDNABIS and the Area Director. It is expected that the editors of the "mapping" document will offer a version of it as an informational, non-WG contribution.
All other documents from the working group have been forwarded to the RFC editor for final processing.
I believe this concludes the business of the IDNABIS Working Group and, as chair, I declare that the Working Group has completed its work and can now be retired from the active list.
I thank the editors, the Area Director, and especially the participants in the IDNABIS working group for their time and thoughtful contributions to the work over the past two years.
Thus, this conclude the IDNAbis WG.
James Seng
19th March 2010
