NAIROBI 7-12 Mar 2010 Kenya hosts ICANN meeting 

The recent approval of the use of non-Latin-character domain names eased one long-standing source of tension in the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, but it introduces technical issues that will need to be aired at the Nairobi ICANN meeting. The introduction of the new characters introduces the biggest technical change to ICANN since it was launched 40 years ago. The change comes a month after the United States released sole oversight of ICANN.

ICANN's Fast Track Process, launched 16 Nov 2009, is viewed as the first step in bringing the 100,000 characters of the languages of the world online for domain names. It will allow nations and territories to apply for Internet extensions reflecting their name – and made up of characters from their national language. If the applications meet criteria that includes government and community support and a stability evaluation, the applicants will be approved to start accepting registrations.

Under pressure from European regulators and critics, Washington announced an agreement between the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and ICANN Sep 30. The deal completes the transition process by which ICANN will become a multi-stakeholder, private sector-led corporation.

Web sites have been able to use some international alphabets for part of the URL, but only in the domain suffix.

PC World notes that international characters will be accepted for domains like .ru (Russia), .cn (China) and other similar domains, but not yet for the generic top level domains like .com and .net. The magazine also points out that the use of international alphabets poses security risks because similar-looking characters, or homoglyphs, could be transposed to spoof a domain name. The concept is similar to techniques used to make more complex passwords.

And some international alphabet characters may appear virtually identical to Latin alphabet characters in some fonts, a problem that could lead to malicious spoofs of websites.

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ICANN
http://www.icann.org/

International domains get ICANN thumbs up (PC World 30 Oct 2009)
http://www.pcworld.com/article/181052/international_domains_get_icann_thumbs_up.html