Thread: Good Interview of ICANN President and CEO Paul Twomey

I was surprised to see such a decent interview of Paul Twomey in a mainstream publication:
World will change ICANN's future, CEO says

Some highlights:

Q: When can we expect to have international top-level domain names in different languages?

A: I'm thinking first quarter of next year. There's a series of countries - the northeast Asians, the Arabs, the Indians, the Arabic-speaking Farsi, south Asia if you like, and then the Bulgarians and the Greeks and the Russians - have all expressed interest in fast-tracking this process. And this has got very high attention.

...

It's also a very high priority for India. The Indians are putting fiber into 600,000 villages across India. Around 150 million people in India speak English. The next billion don't.

So the policy is to bring the Internet to the next 300 to 400 million people in India. To do that they have to have a keyboard that's in the character set of the village. There are 22 official languages and 11 scripts.

Q: What are some of the new domain names that are coming online?

A: I'm hesitating because we leave it to potential applicants to go public rather than us outing the field. But I will give an example.

There's clearly a series of geographic-specific ones. There's a series of cities coming out - "dot berlin," "dot paris," "dot london." There are some people who want to apply for "dot galicia" in Spain.

"Q: What are some of the new domain names that are coming online?

A: I'm hesitating because we leave it to potential applicants to go public rather than us outing the field. But I will give an example.

There's clearly a series of geographic-specific ones. There's a series of cities coming out - "dot berlin," "dot paris," "dot london." There are some people who want to apply for "dot galicia" in Spain."

What a complete load of garbage, simply money for registrars!

As for ICAAN getting their act together, their "fast track" process for idn whatever has been painfully slow.

Originally Posted by wot

"

What a complete load of garbage, simply money for registrars!

Yep Totally, they are releasing extensions so quickly now it makes there value totally useless unless you have the top 10 keywords. ITs just a big gravy train to line the registers directors pockets

I think some of the city ones might be valuable for the same reasons that cctlds are valuable and if the city is big enough and the government promotes the extension - .nyc strikes me as a good example.

However, I think you'd have to be much more selective in the keywords you choose, just because the population of a city is much smaller than the population of a country.

Originally Posted by wot

As for ICAAN getting their act together, their "fast track" process for idn whatever has been painfully slow.

Understatement of the year

Originally Posted by Jeff

Understatement of the year

Lol...so true

I think IDN.IDN has a massive future. When you think about it only something like 300-400million people speak english as a first language. There is a huge untapped market out there.

As for the first .IDN, isn't it already possible to get .cn in .IDN chinese? It appears UAE and Russia will also be some of the first few to have .IDN extensions.

btw Wot are you also over at the idnforum?

Originally Posted by torch

Lol...so true



As for the first .IDN, isn't it already possible to get .cn in .IDN chinese? It appears UAE and Russia will also be some of the first few to have .IDN extensions.

btw Wot are you also over at the idnforum?

Yes, but currently only accessible in China, one of my websites 搞笑.cn with these in China 搞笑.中国/搞笑.中國

And -yes!

wot - neither of those links works for me.

Also, I'm curious - does Apache handle filenames that are IDN? I.e. instead of idn.idn/index.php can you do idn.idn/idn

nice article..thanks for sharing..

Originally Posted by Jeff

wot - neither of those links works for me.

Try this:

here

Originally Posted by Jeff

Also, I'm curious - does Apache handle filenames that are IDN? I.e. instead of idn.idn/index.php can you do idn.idn/idn

Dunno