Seoul, South Korea - ICANN meeting participants from all over the world, notably from Asian countries, gathered on Thursday to offer and listen to public comments on different issues that ICANN has been discussing in its 36th meeting.

The public forum, traditionally done on Thursdays, is ICANN's way of reaching out to the community and providing an opportunity for both the stakeholders and the ICANN board to sit down together and have an interactive discussion.

The international community raised comments on the fast track process for IDNs, in which some countries and territories may have their own IDN ccTLD operational even before the guidelines for IDNs are fully laid out. Chairman Peter Dengate Thrush explained, “(The process) is called a fast track, because a very small number of countries, proportionately, in relation to the total number of countries have been put into a fast track (providing that) they have been able to satisfy us that there is no doubt about the name of the country, the representation of the name of that country in a script used in that country. And those are being allowed to go forward before the full policy development for IDN ccTLDs has been finalized.” He added, “(The) current predictions are, from the survey that's been done, that less than 30 of the approximately 240 country codes will be going down that fast track.” This means that some countries will be using non-English characters in their full Internet addresses soon.

Meanwhile, the limelight also shone on IDN gTLDs as a participant from China, Zhen Cai, spoke up. “Most of the netizens in China cannot remember the frequent Web sites such as dot gov, dot info. This somehow affected our popularizing of these Web sites, though there are many long domain names, it's hard to remember.” More on IDN gTLDs from Dongbum Lee from the host city, Seoul, Korea: I'm the CEO of a small business here in Seoul. While our site is in Hangul, our address on the Internet is not. We look forward to the day when our customers do not need to switch to English to find us on the Internet. We also want potential customers to find us using other languages and scripts such as Chinese and Japanese.”

It is worth mentioning that Netpia, a Seoul-based company has been making it possible for non-English users to type Internet addresses in their own language, one country or one territory at a time, through a service called the Native Language Internet Address (NLIA). Another Asian, Hiro Katsu Ohigashi, from Japan, pointed out: “I kept hearing from people in many countries about interest in new gTLD program. I'd like to inform you that there are a lot of people in Asia who is interested in this opportunity. And they are looking at this opportunity to introduce culture and business and build their identities in the entire world through Internet.”

As the entire Internet community watches ICANN move forward from its ties with the US government, and on to its new gTLD and IDNs plans, it cannot be denied that there will be more changes in the coming months and the Internet will keep evolving with its users' choices.