Thrush was hesitant to offer more specificity about when the first round of applications for new generic top-level domains would be accepted. The timing "is up to the community [and] when the community is satisfied, they'll tell us," he said. ICANN has argued that bringing potentially hundreds of new domains to market will benefit consumers and companies that do business online but intellectual property owners have expressed skepticism. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers and others in Washington have been highly critical.

ICANN's board is poised to approve the related international domain name proposal when it meets on Friday. Thrush said that after several years of hard work by stakeholders, he was "reasonably confident that the board will find [the IDN plan] ready to launch." ICANN President Rod Beckstrom said the first non-Latin script entries into the so-called root zone would likely be in mid-2010.