MARINA DEL REY, CA - The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced in a press release that it has finalized the IDN .test Evaluation Plan and continued taking steps toward insertion of IDN strings in the root zone.
Recent changes to the plan are based on comments received on the IDN public forum and also from consultations with ICANN Technical Advisory Committees. This last version was approved by the ICANN Board at their August 14, 2007 meeting. The resolution directs ICANN Staff to implement the IDN .test Evaluation Plan, and report back to the ICANN Board following the conclusion of the evaluation.
Specifically, the Board approved the delegation of eleven evaluative top-level domains (TLDs) representing the term 'test' translated into: Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil. Following this ICANN Board approval, the delegation request will now go through standard IANA procedures for insertion of top-level domains into the root zone. The technical evaluations of IDN TLDs and their usability in various applications will proceed following their delegation.
This is a major milestone in the IDN Program Plan and signals a significant step forward towards Internationalization of the DNS. It is currently anticipated that delegation of these TLDs and the evaluations, as described in the plan, will commence in September 2007. More information about this project will be made available at http://icann.org/topics/idn.
For more questions about ICANN's IDN Program, contact IDN Program Director Tina Dam at tina.dam@icann.org
