In a news release from Carthage:
"ICANN announced it will launch a broad strategic initiative to enable new generic top level domains (gTLDs). The strategic initiative will include a two-stage approach to move to the full globalization of the market for top-level domains."
This seems to be a step back from the earlier announcement from ICANN about "deployment of internationalized domain names" that Steven Bird criticized here a few months ago. However, I'm not enough of a globalization expert to figure out whether the now-promised "full assessment of technical standards to support multilingual TLD's" is really a step back from the earlier claim that "the commencement of global deployment of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) ... will allow use on the Internet of domain names in languages used in all parts of the world".
Posted by Mark Liberman at November 4, 2003 06:56 PM