Recently meeting in Carthage to resolve issues over the introduction of new generic top level domains (gTLDs), The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has officially undertaken a comprehensive evaluation of how new gTLDs will affect the Internet’s “root server” system and Internet stability as a whole.
Also to be tackled is a review of the selection criteria used for both new and existing TLD registries, and a study of how best to explain the process to the public, including the potential benefits and costs to the consumer of establishing a more competitive environment for authorized TLD registries. This review will take into consideration the opinions of expert advisory panels, regulatory bodies, governmental agencies and private organizations involved with economic, intellectual property, and trademark issues.
These programs are in preparation for a new round of gTLDs to be released next September, as well as the standardization of non-Roman characters included in domain names – a potential stumbling block for the Internet’s root server system.
New sponsored top level domain names (sTLDs) designed to serve specific user communities are on the way as well, adding to the recently released .pro sTLD.
According to ICANN president, Dr Paul Twomey, “ICANN has now moved forward with a program to introduce further competition and choice in the top-level domain markets. We will engage in this directive in order to develop a streamlined process for the introduction of gTLDS. We will be using the early sTLD round to help us engage the community in the process and to further evaluate the best manner to achieve the appropriate balance between corporate/sponsor control of TLD's and ICANN's role of 'management on behalf of the Internet community'.”
ICANN also announced that along with the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), it will assess the technical requirements needed to support multilingual domain names, in answer to the repeated call for domain names containing non-English characters. As part of this process, trial systems using several languages are being examined for stability and usability throughout the system.
