A public comment period opened on February 18, 2009 on a number of proposed implementation features in the “Fast Track” process, as well as an updated version of the Fast Track’s Implementation Plan, a press release by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) stated.

The Fast Track is a mechanism to introduce a limited number of non-contentious internationalized country-code top level domain names (IDN ccTLDs) to the Internet.

In the initial draft of the Fast Track Implementation Plan, a number of open issues were identified that require further input from the community and need to be resolved to complete the implementation.

There are separate papers of proposed implementation details. The papers are based on comments and input received from the community, notably from meetings held at ICANN’s international public meeting in Cairo in November 2008.

Along with the papers are: an updated Draft Implementation Plan; a document providing a consolidated overview of the comments received and document containing staff considerations regarding the comments received on the initial Draft Implementation Plan.

This new version of the plan is intended to elicit further community feedback both during and after the ICANN meeting in Mexico City next month (March 1-6, 2009).

The public comment period covers both the Draft Implementation Plan and the papers. Comments received will be used to revise the plan in preparation of a Final Implementation Plan. The comment period ends on April 6, 2009.

The papers describe:

1. Documentation of Responsibility between ICANN and prospective IDN ccTLD Managers.

2. Development and use of IDN tables and character variants for second and top level strings.

SOURCE:AGIPNEWS