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Next stage of gTLD program to be less English-language focused

ICANN CEO Goran Marby shared his vision of what the new stage of the gTLD program should look like during a session of the recent ICANN 71. According to Marby, the first stage of the program was too English-centric, and this is the main thing to avoid in the future. The ICANN president meant that most applicants sought domains with English-language names.

“I don’t think that’s fair for the rest of the world,” Goran Marby noted. He also stressed the importance of internationalized domain names (IDNs) and emphasized that it was necessary to address the issue of universal acceptance of IDNs and EAI, which use scripts different from ASCII, as soon as possible.

While recognizing the importance of the problem raised by Goran Marby, it should be noted in fairness that at the first stage of the new gTLD program ICANN put a lot of effort into promoting internationalized domains. Applications for IDNs received some benefits, with 61 internationalized ccTLDs going through a fast-track review and approval procedure. Moreover, the first domain delegated at this stage was in Arabic, Domain Incite recalls, citing the news. In total, 116 applications for IDNs were filed during the first stage, and 97 of them made it into the DNS root zone. Of course, this is not much, considering there were 1,930 applications in all, but the numbers probably reflect the activity of applicants for new domains and their preferences. Perhaps the situation will change at the second stage of the program.

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