For all of you following the issue we raised originally to ICANN leadership: As a quick recap, we are concerned that IDNs and their process of implementation should be directed in a way to allow for multi-lingual navigation of the Internet and not used as a tool to control access, impose censorship or limit freedom of expression online.

We raised this via a joint letter with NCUC letter addressed to ICANN dated July 29th, which we also posted on our blog. As we waited for a response from ICANN, we followed up on August 21 with another blog and raised it again on August 26th via a blog on circle ID.

The good news is that we have a response dated August 29th which we received via fax on Sept 2nd. It states:

Dear Ms. Raad and Dr Mueller,

Thank you for your thoughts concerning the deployment of IDNs.

ICANN is still working through the process of deployment of IDN TLDs and you will have the opportunity to review the implementation program when it is public.

Sincerely,

Paul Twomey

We hope to actually have a dialogue during this process and not just when it is finalized. To that end, we are working with NCUC and other stakeholders to suggest some improvements which may safeguard the rights and interests of the end-users in this process. In the interest of transparency we will share these suggestions on our blogs to refine and get continued feedback from our community. Stay tuned…

source:http://blog.pir.org/?p=28