ICANN management has concluded the corporation's 2nd general meeting of the year with upbeat comments on new Internet domains. Not everyone shares that optimism.
ICANN CEO Paul Twomey and Domaines.info's Van Gelder discuss Internet governance at an ISOC France workshop last year.
"Real progress" made on the launch of new TLDs (Top Level Domains such as .COM or .INFO, recent launches include .MOBI while other new TLD proposals, like .XXX, have been turned down by ICANN), or so the official San Juan meeting wrap-up press release would have us believe.
"With the progress we have made in San Juan, we’re on track for the new applications and approvals policy to be ready for the start of 2008, and the introduction of new TLDs by mid-year," ICANN CEO Paul Twomey was quoted as saying.
Disbelief
However, it seems ICANN's idea of "progress" isn't the same as everyone else's. Long time ICANN watchers have often criticised the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers for its lack of transparency on crucial issues that affect all Internet users. People like Brett Fausett, an American lawyer and long-time ICANN Blogger.
"ICANN's President Paul Twomey has declared that ICANN's new gTLD policy is "on track." The claim reminds me of the way that Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq back in 2003," says a clearly stunned-into-disbelief-at-the-audacity-of-the-official-press-release-Fausett in one of his latest blog entries. "It would be one thing to say that ICANN is "pushing as fast as it can," "making up for lost time," "trying to correct the mistakes of the past," or, you know, just anything with a ring of truth to it, but it really does a disservice to ICANN to play us all for fools by not even acknowledging that this process is at least five years overdue."
The claim that real progress has been made was also disputed earlier in the San Juan meeting by proponents of new TLDs such as .BERLIN or .PARIS, who came out of a new TLD workshop organised by ICANN with the impression that any new launch might be delayed by more than a year.
IDNs another "real progress" area
There does seem to be cause for real optimism on another of the Internet's current issues: IDNs. Internationalized Domain Names aim to allow and include local language use in a system originally designed for English character sets only. Think domain names in accented French or German and scripts as diverse as Arabic, Chinese or Cyrillic…
Another excerpt from the official ICANN San Juan press release quoting Paul Twomey: "On IDNs, we heard that the technical community has made real progress. If all things go well, we will see IDNs evaluated live in the root by November this year. This is great news for the international community."
A live root evaluation of IDNs should mean that these local language domain names will start working at a global level before the end of the year.
Of course, whether turning a global one-script system into a new Tower of Babel mish-mash of many languages and alphabets represents "real progress" is another question…
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