ICANN President and CEO Paul Twomey, a genial Australian whose job is to balance all of ICANN's opposing factions, called Reding's stance "personal" and said the G12 is not necessary.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: When can we expect to have international top-level domain names in different languages?
A: I'm thinking first quarter of next year. There's a series of countries - the northeast Asians, the Arabs, the Indians, the Arabic-speaking Farsi, south Asia if you like, and then the Bulgarians and the Greeks and the Russians - have all expressed interest in fast-tracking this process. And this has got very high attention.
In Russia, it is an agenda item for both the president and the prime minister. Similarly, we've had lots of good conversations with the Chinese - it's going to the top of ministries and to state councils.
It's also a very high priority for India. The Indians are putting fiber into 600,000 villages across India. Around 150 million people in India speak English. The next billion don't.
So the policy is to bring the Internet to the next 300 to 400 million people in India. To do that they have to have a keyboard that's in the character set of the village. There are 22 official languages and 11 scripts.
Q: If I had a domain name that was in, for example, Chinese characters, and I didn't have my (Chinese keyboard) with me, how would I type it?
A: Let me give an Australian example. I've got six or seven domain names from some of the businesses I've had. We had domain names that were "dot com" because we wanted to say we were global, particularly focused on North America, and we had "dot biz" for similar reasons. But we had "dot au" and "dot hk" because we wanted to say we're Australian or we're Hong Kong Chinese, or whatever.
Even in ASCII, people use domain names as a form of identity. I think that will be even more so around international domain name country codes.
If you're in China, people will use the Chinese. And if they want to deal with Wal-Mart as a buyer of their manufactured goods, they can have a "dot com" or a "dot biz" or something in Roman characters, and both Web sites will probably resolve to a hosted site that has English and Chinese on it.
And if people have only an Urdu domain name, then they are probably saying that they don't identify people who speak English or whatever.
I do think also that innovation will come in here and people will do all sorts of translation.
Q: What are some of the new domain names that are coming online?
A: I'm hesitating because we leave it to potential applicants to go public rather than us outing the field. But I will give an example.
There's clearly a series of geographic-specific ones. There's a series of cities coming out - "dot berlin," "dot paris," "dot london." There are some people who want to apply for "dot galicia" in Spain.
This article appeared on page K - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle