As described in earlier announcements on this topic, the benefits and risks associated with the potential delegation of Variant TLDs have been widely discussed and solutions are being pursued.
ICANN is publishing today the issues report completed by the Latin case study team, for public comment. In accordance with the Variant Issues Project [PDF, 195 KB], ICANN has conducted six case studies of individual scripts to investigate any issues that need to be resolved to facilitate a good user experience for IDN variant TLDs.Individual case studies for the Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Greek, and Latin scripts have been undertaken. Each study, carried out by a volunteer community study team with help from ICANN staff, concentrates on specific issues that are relevant to the individual scripts.
It is expected that the results of the case studies will play a crucial role in the identification of solutions towards the delegation of IDN variant TLDs. With these individual case studies being completed, a team comprised of representatives from the case study teams and ICANN will develop a single, integrated issues report to be published in December 2011. After that, work on developing solutions can proceed as a second phase.
Public comment on these reports will inform the formulation of the combined issues report. The public comment forum is open through 14 November 2011.
On 25 September 2010 the Board of Directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) directed the CEO "to develop an issues report identifying what needs to be done with the evaluation, possible delegation, allocation and operation of gTLDs containing variant characters IDNs as part of the new gTLD process in order to facilitate the development of workable approaches to the deployment of gTLDs containing variant characters IDNs."
This announcement was sourced from :
http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-2-07oct11-en.htm
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