The benefits and risks associated with the potential delegation of variant TLDs have been widely discussed. On 20 April 2011, ICANN announced the initiation of the IDN Variant Issues Project. This project is dedicated to identifying the issues involved in the delegation and use of IDN Variant TLDs.
To achieve that goal, on 9 June 2011, ICANN announced the formation of six case study teams – Arabic, Devanagari, Chinese, Cyrillic, Greek and Latin scripts. Since then, these teams have been working hard on identifying issues involved in IDN Variant TLDs in their particular scripts with the expectation that each of these teams will publish their reports prior to the ICANN meeting in Dakar (24-28 October). After that, a final integrated issues report will be published, describing the challenges associated.Additionally, we are pleased to announce the formation of a team, comprised of experts from the case study teams, who will advise ICANN in completing a consolidated issues report that will summarize and synthesize the issues identified by the case study teams. The group's work in preparation of this consolidated report is scheduled to start in October at the ICANN public meeting in Dakar, Senegal.
The individual members of the issues report coordination team (listed below) have expertise in the areas of: DNS, IDNA, linguistics, security and scalability, policy, registry/registrar operations, and community representation.
An all-day working session of the coordination team members only is being planned for the Dakar meeting, followed by an open public session at which representatives from the case study teams and the ICANN project team will present the case studies and provide an update on the consolidated issues report.
This announcement was sourced from :
http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-4-03oct11-en.htm