ICANN announced the Timetable of Proposed Testing of IDNS in Top-Level Domains:
ICANN released today a statement outlining a proposal by the President’s Committee on IDNs (co-chaired by Hualin Qian, Mouhamet Diop and Paul Twomey) for a timetable leading to the technical testing of IDNs at the TLD level. The timetable contains a series of consultations and collaborations to ensure that the testing, when launched, will preserve DNS stability and security. It does not purport to be a presumption on any related policy issues which are in the perview of the ICANN policy bodies. The timetable calls for the start of testing in July 2006.
Basically, they are trying two DNS technique, a direct NS delegation vs DNAME assignment (think “soft linking” in Unix). I remember speaking to Prof. Qian in Perth about these briefly and oh gosh, finally!
