CircleID

Michael, very good paper, I agree with a lot of your analysis.

It is NOT in the interest of member States, neither Internet community, nor ICANN to develop ad hoc solutions related to very political issue of country names.
It is a mistake of the IDN WG to raise expectations about "fast track" relying on undefined "Linguistic Experts Advisory Panels" (one shall never forget that more than 120 official administrative languages are used by 192 sovereign countries, and that nobody speaks or write more than very few languages - that facts demand for prudent coordination).
I have been attending the IDN WG meeting yesterday, June 21st 2008, in Paris, to listen and learn more - I was in the silent audience.
I learnt that "pressing needs" mean a candidate IDN registry is ready to apply - which is totally different from what one may expect from the used words. Asked for a change, the IDN WG Chairman declined (*).
After the meeting I have asked two persons from Asia if their countries need the IDN ccTLD immediately - and got two "no" answers.
I have asked who will maintain the list of "short domain for a country", ICANN ? ISO 3166 ? UNESCO ? The person I asked that question did not consider it's an issue.
I learnt that for some attendees the UN list of country names, long version or short version, are too long: some Chinese, Korean and Japanese would like to have just one character in their scripts as a short domain for a country. Cyrillic script is very capable to give 2 letters per country, exactly like Latin. I guess the same would be true for at least alphabet based scripts, such as Arabic. Nobody from the IDN WG stressed out that the most complicated is the coordination between all countries using the same or similar scripts, just to be sure homonyms are avoided, governments are happy, and the best global compromise is reached. As a matter of fact not each and every country has an alpha-2 ISO 3166-1 code very close to its name - that has always been mathematically impossible.

(*) Incidentally the translation of "pressing needs" to French gives "besoins pressants", which is a term used when one rush to the toilets.