ICANN to open the floodgates for new gTLDs and announces a gTLDs Draft Guidebook and made it available for comment on October 23 2008 .
Significant concerns were raised during the ICANN Cairo meeting November 2-7 2008 by the global Internet community including by MINC Chairman and CEO Mr. Khaled Fattal, Ms Emily Taylor, Head of the legal department at Nominet who runs the .co.uk ccTLD, amongst many others.
Click the following link provided to read the offical transcripts and all the comments and concerns CairoIntroNewgTLDs2NOV08.txt
You can read the gTLDs Draft Guidebook in English and in Arabic at gTLDs Draft Guidebook/Arabic translated courtesy of Live Multilingual Translator™.
Comments and additional concerns on this monumental development can be raised through MINC at hvx07@nrmx.lit and at http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtld-comments-en.htm
Official Transcripts of the ICANN Cairo meeting where these concerns were raised are available on the ICANN website and can be viewed at CairoIntroNewgTLDs2NOV08.txt
About MINC
Formed in 2000, MINC is the Multilingual Internet Names Consortium, aims to promote a multilingual Internet through the facilitation of research development, education and deployments of Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) and other naming systems of Internet navigation. MINC’s work dates back to mid 90’s to promote the Multilingualization of the Internet, the internationalization of Internet names including but not limited to multilingual Internet domain names and keywords. Over the years, MINC has established a wide range of links with international organizations, stakeholder organizations and other processes including The United Nations, the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS), ICANN, ITU, WIPO, IETF, as well as language groups such as JDNA (Japanese), CDNA (Chinese), INFITT (Tamil), Euro-LINC (European Languages), CYINC (Cyrillic), GLWG (Georgian), RLWG (Russian ) as well as The Arabic language and scripts WG (Arabic) and ULWG (Urdu). Our language groups develop their own language and variant tables, and coordinate with each other on these tables. They also discuss other IDN related issues like the development of Dispute Resolution Policies and the use of IDN in software applications. For more information about MINC, please refer to the website at http://www.minc.org or contact MINC secretariat at hvx07@nrmx.lit.
About MINC ICMC
Formed in 2006, MINC's International Coordination Mechanism Council (ICMC) aims to coordinate with all local authorities and jurisdictions and known operators of IDN TLDs in various local jurisdictions, for a an equitable multilingual Internet and information society based on mutual respect, local empowerment and the right of all people for self-E-determination as a function of their human rights.
ICMC Technical Coordination;
This MINC ICMC ad hoc committee coordinates the technical parameters involved in supporting a truly multilingual domain name system. All deployments of IDN should be Internet RFC- compliant and registered and tracked with MINC's IDN database.