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:
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.