MARINA DEL REY, CA - This is a first Discussion Draft of the Initial Report of the IDNC Working Group (IDNC WG). It is published for comment and input from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) community

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Currently, domain names in the .nz space only allow the 26 basic English (Latin) alphabet characters a-z, digits and the '-' hyphen. The Mâori alphabet has an additional five characters, the macronised vowels â, ç, î, ô, and û, which are currently not allowed in .nz domain names.

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The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Unesco and Icann will collaborate on global efforts to forge universal standards towards building a multilingual cyberspace.

The three agencies organised a workshop on the subject at this week's Internet Governance Forum (IGF) taking place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The partners said multilingualism is a key concept to ensure cultural diversity and participation for all linguistic groups in cyberspace.

There is growing concern that hundreds of local languages may be sidestepped, albeit unintentionally, in the radical expansion of internet communication and information, they said.

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NeuStar won a new contract to run .us, winning out over .info registry Afilias to manage America's country code top-level domain. The U.S. Department of Commerce posted the award notice Oct. 18 and Friday signed a three- year contract with two one-year options, NTIA said. NeuStar's original contract expires Oct. 25. NeuStar's bid "met our selection criteria and we are confident of its ability to manage the .us domain space," said NTIA Administrator John Kneuer. NTIA will supervise administration of the domain to ensure stability and security, working closely with the registry to spur its growth, particularly in the kids.us space, he said

Source: Warren's Washington Internet Daily - Volume 8; Issue 203

Kim Davies from CircleID talks about some of the difficulties in expressing scripts in a consistent way over the Internet, following the introduction of eleven new top-level domains in the DNS root zone.

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ICANN wants every Internet user to help in testing Internationalized (non ASCII) Domain Names as part of an evaluation program being launched on October 15, 2007.

By allowing users to type non-ASCII characters (accented or Cyrillic letters for example), Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) have been "engineered" to do just that. But their implementation raises all sorts of technical difficulties for an Internet initially meant only for a few select scientists to share files.

Working to overcome the problems posed by IDNs, ICANN okayed a test phase whereby 11 versions of the Internet extension .TEST have been activated.

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