Under the new leadership of Khaled Fattal, the new Chairman of the Multilingual Internet Names Consortium (MINC), our drive to restructure the consortium continues.
As the proposed standards for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) is expected to reach Internet standards status soon, and the interoperability, implementation and deployment of IDNs to follow quickly, MINC has taken the proactive approach to create two new categories of organisational membership within its membership structure. These two categories will accommodate the Network Information Centres (NIC) and the country code Top Level Domain administrators and managers (ccTLDs).
“A place has been created and reserved for every ccTLD and NIC of the world. They are accorded this MINC membership in recognition of their key roles they play in the impending deployment of IDNs,” said Fattal, who took over the leadership late last year. “With both observer status in all MINC meetings, and full rights to participate in the coordination of the deployment of IDNs by MINC, we believe that this gives the due recognition to the role that ccTLDs have played in the development of the Internet as we know of today,” he added.
The IDN technologies available today offered by more than a dozen vendors, technology and service providers worldwide, many of whom are members of MINC, will enable those who face the language barrier, hitherto unable to use the Internet because of difficulty in using Latin characters in web and email addresses, to navigate the net using their own languages and scripts.
