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 :-)

I am in Kuala Lumpur this wekend to give an overview of IDN to Government Advisory Committee of ICANN.

This ICANN meeting seem to be political charged, surrounding mainly on the 15M USD proposed budget for ICANN and heated discussion in ccNSO. There are also some discussion about new sponsorred TLD and and .net redelegation. Rumors also goes around that ICANN should consider auctioning TLDs in future to make up for their budget :-) (heck, why not just auction .net? :-)

Anyway, on the way back to Singapore now but will be coming back again on Tuesday…See you all at the IDN Workshop on Wednesday.

Just concluded a successful APEET meeting in Singapore (thanks you!) and I am getting to leave for Kuala Lumpur in 10mins time. But before I leave, I thought of leaving two interesting news I saw today.

First, is a report of Verisign SiteFinder by Steve Crocker (a representive of Security and Stability Advisory Committee of ICANN) titled Redirection in the COM and NET Domains, A Report from the ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC). An executive summary of the report can be found at CircleID. Bravo! Bravo! I taken the same position which you can read here, here and here.

The second is this excellent contribution from SaudiNIC on their experiences in deploying Arabic Domain Names (via ITU-SPU). It is the best written report I seen from Arabic world..well-written, well-thought and technically strong. I actually learn a lot reading from the report. I am really encouraged at this work…and there might be hope for Arabic Domain Names after all. (Is it the same guy that show me the Etisalat Arabic Domain Name … I will know soon :-)

Here are Michael Moore’s extensive factchecking notes on Fahrenheit 911. (via Joiito). What it doesn’t say is how Michael strings the facts together in such a way to paint a reality he likes his audience to see. (No, don’t get me wrong…I watched the show in US and love it :-)

Incidently, the next few days will be pretty hectic for me, with APEET (Asia Pacific ENUM Engineering Team) meeting in Singapore and travelling up to Kuala Lumpur for ICANN meeting and also UNDP-APDIP’s Internet Goverance discussion. Oh, it would also be fun to catch up with friends … :-)