ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), has been the heart of Internet from 1998. ICANN coordinates the Internet's address system and parts of the Internet's backbone connections. As a nonprofit organization located in California, ICANN has been under pressure by politics, and in the center of heated worldwide debates over who should control the Internet… On September 30th this year, joint agreement between U.S. Department of Commerce and E.U. expires, so talks between European Union commissioner Viviane Reding and President Obama are ongoing. Viviane Reding wants ICANN to be made accountable to an international body - a "G12 for Internet governance.", rather than just to US. ICANN just got new president and CEO - Rod Beckstrom (the former U.S. cybersecurity chief). Beckstrom will be replacing Dr. Paul Twomey who had been serving this position since March 2003. Board of ICANN argues that it is ready to stand on its own… Future of ICANN is not clear as of this moment, but we can speculate that US will not want to release it from its grip.

Internet will continue to change as ICANN opens it to millions of new users outside the United States. First major changes will be international top-level domain names in non ASCII characters. This will most probably happen in first quarter of 2010, for number of countries including the northeast and south Asia, Arab countries, the Indians, the Arabic-speaking Farsi. Even bigger expansion will take place few months later with China, Bulgaria, Greece and the Russia. All these countries expressed strong interest in having top domains in their own letters/alphabet. Most existing registrars will apply for service in new tld domains as well, so people can register new domain names with companies they already know.

Why is this such a big priority? Imagine India. Government is installing fiber into 600,000 villages across India. Around 150 million of population speaks English, but the next billion does not.  India is complicated, because it has 22 official languages and 11 scripts. ICANN’s mission is to design these changes so that everything will still work together. An bad example would be proprietary solution : for example in the Middle East, where there were some ideas to put mechanism fully Arabic experience at the ISP level. The difficulty with that is that if you went to Switzerland on holidays, it wouldn't work, you could not connect “home”. ICANN is working on mechanism that would work no matter where you are. Internet is only one single global network, connected with technology like TCP/IP protocol which doesn't recognize geographic boundaries.

The problem with non ASCII characters is – how to type Chinese domain name, if I don’t have Chinese keyboard. Solution is simple – businesses usually have many domain names.. Like company.com (for international visitors), then company.au for Australian customers, company.hk for Hong Kong Chinese… Even in ASCII, people use domain names as a form of identity. With global domain names we will see even more international domain name country codes. Most probably international sites will have domain names in many character sets – resolving to same host/server. If they will only have Chinese domain, they are probably not interested in international visitors/customers – meaning – business or interest is only local.

In mid 2010 a series of city domains will be available. Like "dot berlin," "dot paris," "dot london," "dot nyc." … Currently there are over 170 million registered domain names in the world. Over half are under various country codes. The most popular "Dot com" just grew past 80 million domains, making it the most popular generic top-level domain.

Over 70 percent of the registrations are in North America, so in some respects, "dot com" is the de facto country code for the United States. As recession is hitting on worldwide population, more people are losing their jobs, and more and more are deciding they want to set up small businesses on the internet – and they will need a domain name. Many will buy new domain names, but sometimes secondary market offers valuable existing domain names with history, and good value, which might be a better choice. But in this case it is important to know how to appraise domain names. So expectation that the top-level domain space would go flat and that only country codes would keep increasing is far from truth. At least for now…

Story based on interview with Paul Twomey published here.