MINC Board member, Dr Charles Lee, consultant to Neustar, who was responsible for the North American telephone numbering administration and Internet domain names: .BIZ & .US, noted: “In the deployment of IDN, we have the chance to do it orderly and systematically, by engaging all stakeholders, especially the ccTLD managers. No one ccTLD can go it alone without causing the system to break somewhere else. The unity and integrity of the Internet system depends on this kind of cooperation as a pre-requisite to IDN deployment.”
“Sometimes, a language or script is not necessarily ‘owned’ by ccTLDs. For example, my native tongue is Tamil, and the origin of the Tamil script is in Tamil Nadu, a state of India. Which ccTLD is responsible for promoting Tamil IDNs?” asked S Maniam, who is also a member of the International Forum for IT in Tamil (INFITT). “As chairman of Working Group 3 of INFITT, we have initiated the process amongst the Tamil community world wide, and through our cooperation with MINC, will take steps to discuss with ccTLDs and NICs in countries where Tamil speaking people represent a significant population. This move by MINC to involve ccTLDs and NICs is something that will help us very much.”
MINC has a history of links with key persons involved in the IDN process. It has a number of language working groups, and links with key language organisations involved with multilingual issues on the Internet. It has working groups in Arabic, Russian, Cyrillic and Tamil. It has board members working in JET led by Japan with Korea as a key member, Chinese Domain Names Consortium (CDNC) and others. MINC collaborates formally or informally with key international organisations such as INFITT, IETF, ICANN, ITU and WIPO in workshops and meetings and other ways to promote IDN awareness.
