ICANN meeting venue “insensitive and hurtful”
ICANN has taken some criticism over the decision to host its flagship Universal Acceptance 2024 meeting in Serbia.
An individual named Dmitry Noskov has written to ICANN to complain that the Universal Acceptance Steering Group will hold its “Keystone” meeting — the main event of the UA Day series of meetings around the world — later this month in Belgrade. He wrote (pdf):
Given the current global tension in the region due to ongoing conflict and the close cultural and historical ties between Serbia and Russia, which have led to diplomatic and trade actions by several countries against Russia, I am concerned about the implications of holding the event in Belgrade. It is crucial to consider the potential perception of insensitivity or hurtfulness to global sentiments, especially to those affected by the conflict.
Unlike most of Europe, Serbia has maintained a somewhat neutral stance on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and there is reportedly large popular support for Russia, and a large Russian population, in the country. Russia and Serbia are old allies.
ICANN has taken a generally pro-Ukraine stance. It donated $1 million to relief efforts in 2022 after the war started. It also lobbied against the Russian nomination for ITU secretary-general. Russia’s ccTLD registry cut off its ICANN funding last year.
CEO Sally Costerton replied (pdf) to Noskov to say that the choice of Belgrade as the keystone UA Day event for 2024 was made by the UASG.
The UA Day event in Belgrade is being hosted by local ccTLD registry RNIDS, which runs .rs and the Cyrillic equivalent .срб.
Serbia’s Cyrillic domain approved
Serbia has moved one step closed to having a localized version of its country-code top-level domain added to the DNS root, after ICANN approved its choice of string.
According to the Serbian National Register of Internet Domain Names (RNIDS), which manages .rs, ICANN has told it the Cyrillic string .срб has been approved (Serbian PDF).
The ccTLD would become the second Cyrillic namespace to be approved, after the Russian Federation, under ICANN’s internationalized domain name fast-track process.
Wikipedia tells me that Serbian is the only European language to use both Latin and Cyrillic characters, but that nowadays Cyrillic is the only official script.
I believe the Latin transliteration of the approved string is .”srb”.
RNIDS said it expects to start accepting registrations in the second half of 2011, following public consultations.
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