I am back in KL today for the ICANN IDN Workshop. Yes, I am one of the unnamed speaker for the morning session chair’ed by Sharil and Vint Cerf.
John Klensin basically took over the stage giving a tutorial of the higher level problem, the Internationalization or more accurately the multilingualism of the Internet. John noted at that this is either a risk or opportunity. Do it well and we will bring Internet to the next stage and do it badly, we risk fragmentation of the Internet. I was asked to give a tutorial on the IDN standard but really, IDN is only a small piece of the bigger picture.
The afternoon was more of series of presentations of updates from different countries and experiences of IDN deploymnet. I gave a presentations on the JET Guideline in this session. Interesting stuff in this session includes (1) Japan is getting their mobile browsers to support IDN (2) Korea domain names registration shot up t0 70k almost overnight (3) Verisign already migrated their IDN registrations to standards.
I am waiting for an exciting deployment experiences from Arabic world (I recommended Prof. Al-Zoman to be included in this session) and also the next step discussion by Vint….more of it later :-)
