More On ICANN's Big Announcement
A flurry of new top-level Web domain names expected to be rolled out by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers starting in 2009 will be executed with "a large dose of common sense," the organization's vice president for corporate affairs told CongressDaily on the eve of ICANN's release of draft guidelines for the long-awaited process. Under the plan, any entity could apply for any domain as long as they could pay a hefty registration fee but ICANN wants to make sure that all Internet stakeholders are able to provide their input along the way.
"There are lots of questions about how this is going to be implemented and we're not pretending that we've got everything locked down and agreed upon," Paul Levins said in an interview. "We want to have a really robust debate about it." One area that he hopes will spur a lively conversation is the introduction of geographic domain names like .france, and .germany. "I hope governments will be encouraged to get involved in this discussion," Levins said. ICANN also expects a number of non-English domains to be introduced, particularly from Thailand, Japan, Russia and other countries that don’t use Roman script, he predicted.
Industry representatives and U.S. government officials already have concerns about ICANN's plan. "ICANN's new program is a big undertaking that is fraught with problems from many constituencies," National Telecommunications and Information Administration spokesman Todd Sedmak said. "Based on the information released, we have questions that we will want ICANN to answer before they move forward."
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