Brett Fausett reported that Verisign is launching TLDs in IDN format, meaning that you would type 中国, rather than .cn. As a strange coincidence, I blogged about this yesterday. I predicted that countries are becoming impatient with ICANN taking too much time to allow IDN TLDs to be included in the root.

Little did I foresee that the very company which is most interested in the current status quo of artificial scarcity of gTLDs would be the one forcing the hand of ICANN.

Although Verisign runs the hidden root server, I cannot imagine them actually adding these IDN TLDs to the ICANN/DoC root without the agreement of their friends at DoC. I guess Verisign is offering this service through a plug-in of some sort to install in your web browser, just like alternative root servers did in the past. Or they could run an alternative root server system. If this was the case, it would be quite disrespectful towards those would provide them with a comfortable revenue stream, ie ICANN, IANA and DoC.