Vittorio: You say "Most ccTLD registries do not have "the same economic interest as Afilias and Verisign", they steward a national resource..." I disagree, I think you are naively spouting nice-sounding rhetoric used to rationalize monopoly privileges. This points to a major difference between people who have experience in dealing with the policy issues around the breakup of historical telecom monopolies and those who don't. National telecom monopolies ALL used "national sovereignty," "national security," "national this and that" as excuses for their exclusive control. But it was really all about control and money, not about "stewarding a national resource" (whatever that means). And as the virtues and benefits of competition became evident those arguments collapsed. I have personally talked to two major non-European ccTLDs who will come right out privately and say they don't want IDN competitors horning in on what they consider to be their markets. They want to get into the market first, because they know that whoever does will (just like VeriSign) control most of the market. If you feed them this "stewardship" line I'm sure they will use it to the hilt, but it won't change what the game is about one bit. I am not sure what point you are making when you say, "local Internet communities do not give a damn about preserving global competition, if this means that they are deprived of the chance of having domain names in their script." First, many local Internet communities do give many damns about competition. Second, this is a false dichotomy. Global competition will provide most if not all internet communities with domain names in their script. The issue is whether the operator is the incumbent monopoly or whether someone else has a chance. And when you are dealing with scripts -- any script you can name -- the potential market NEVER coincides with a "local community" but is always transnational and trans-local. So it's not clear what "community" should decide. But to find common ground, it's true that incumbent ccTLDs don't have to be delegated the new IDN ccTLDs; if ICANN is going to abandon its painfully developed new TLD application process and create a "fast track" it should at least require a competitive bidding process in each country that gets one.