ICANN has in the past been a somewhat technically-focused body, he says, but the selection of new gTLDs (generalized top-level domains like .info or .xxx) has an impact on public policy.

ICANN is working towards a standard process for vetting new gTLD proposals, and this should be in place by the end of this year, Cerf says.

One of the other big initiatives for the rest of this year is a test of two ways of representing "internationalized" domain names with characters outside the Roman alphabet -- an important ingredient for full inclusion of all nations.

Various ad-hoc schemes are in place at present, either at name resolvers on the network, in ISPs or as browser plug-ins. "That's fine if all the people who interact with your site have that plug-in," he says, but those that don't will get a "not found" response or even go to a different site from the one they were expecting.

A consistent process for creating and managing such domains and requests to the sites has to be devised, Cerf says.