A2K2
The second Access to Knowledge conference at Yale is going on this weekend. (Conference site is here.)
Here's the wiki page for the Internationalized Domain Names panel (it has notes on it). It was a distinguished panel, with Dr. Wei Mao, Ram Mohan, Hong Xue, Peter Yu, and Milton Mueller speaking.
Ram Mohan's talk about the need for a sustainable policy framework for IDNs was particularly interesting (see the wiki for more detail). He talked about India as a case study — 22 official languages, newspapers offered in 87 languages, and only one ascii-based DNS. His view is that adequate technical and protocol standards already exist for IDNs, and that what's incomplete is the policy to govern the rollout of IDNs. He had several suggestions for what principles should guide that policy, including avoiding user confusion, adopting the UDRP, and consulting with governments.
Hong Xue pointed out that the ICANN Board passed a resolution in Sept. 2000 saying that ICANN “recognizes that it is important
that the Internet evolve to be more accessible to those who do
not use the ASCII character set.”