To many nations and citizens around the world, especially the Non-English speaking communities, this will be seen as a strategically alarming direction for the global Internet. US laws remain set to govern ICANN's New gTLDs and the coming multilingual Internet in languages like Arabic, Chinese, Urdu, Cyrillic and many others which these New gTLDs will bring with them.

The clause on US laws appears on page 27 of the last Guidebook under the heading "Legal Compliance". It remained unchanged, un-discussed, and un-addressed by ICANN since Guidebook version 5 (DAG 5) came out last year despite many official open letters and interventions to ICANN. 

Under this rule any applicant or entity whether Chinese, Russian or Arab, and regardless of their nationality, will be screened against U.S. laws and its economic and trade sanction program administered by the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the U.S. Department of the Treasury. These U.S. Sanctions are imposed on certain countries, entities and individuals that appear on its OFAC's list of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (the SDN List).  

On this latest news Multilingual Internet Group, Ankabooot and MINC Chairman Khaled Fattal said: "There is a great realistic risk now that many governments and local language communities would boycott the New gTLD program. Some governments may actively start to consider deploying their own alternative Internets globally with serious economic and political consequences. The Internet we all use today, which is U.S. controlled and ICANN managed on their behalf, will no longer remain the only Internet root. We warned ICANN and the U.S. about this many times publicly and privately."

Click to here read the full story.