ICANN passes resolution to China's IDN ccTLD applications

NAIROBI, March 13 (Xinhua) -- The wrap-up meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) board passed a resolution to China's IDN ccTLD applications, the Chinese delegation to the meeting has told Xinhua.

According to this resolution, ICANN president and CEO has been assigned to draft an Implementation Plan for this urgent issue which has been bothering ICANN for quite some time since the announcement of the approval of the first four IDN ccTLD applications.

Thanks to the progress reached Friday at the Nairobi's conference, China's IDN ccTLD application will be approved as early as April and Chinese Internet users will be able to surf the Internet with native language.

CNNIC, ".China" requestor, welcomes the Board resolution, while encouraging ICANN to take swift action to make ".China" Top Level Domain a reality as soon as possible.

ICANN is the body who is in charge of the coordination and management of the Internet DNS and IP addresses. The IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) ccTLD Fast Track Process was approved by the ICANN Board last year and the first requests were received in 2009.

The Process enables countries and territories to submit requests to ICANN for IDN ccTLDs, representing their respective country or territory names in scripts other than Latin.

Among them, China Internet Network Information Center submitted its IDN ccTLD application, namely ".China" to ICANN.On Friday's meeting, the ICANN board passes the resolution of "Principles for Handling Synchronized IDN ccTLDs for the fast track process", enabling ".China" application be approved soon.

Sources close to this matter disclosed that ICANN aims to approve ".China" as early as April.

There are 384 million Chinese Internet users, one fourth of Global Internet users. Chinese Internet users have long demanded Chinese Domain Names,hoping to be bridged the digital divide set by the language barrier with the successful application of Chinese domain name.