Stephane Van Gelder - IDNs

Garden furniture equates to impressive IDN sale

stephane.vangelder@indom.com (Stephane Van Gelder) — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 18:00:35 +0100

DomainPulse reports that a couple of .DE domains, including an IDN domain, have been sold for an impressive €150,000.

The two domains are gartenmöbel.de and gartenmoebel.de (garden furniture in German) and the sale is interesting for several reasons.

Number One, seeing a pair of domains sold together is not as common as it might seem, even though it makes perfect sense for a domain investor to try to cover more ground and get a wider footprint by buying two related domains.

It's also interesting to see an IDN domain reaching six figures, although obviously the domain's appeal is boosted by being sold along with the corresponding non-accented version.

This sale is yet another sign that IDNs are gaining wider acceptance and should now be given serious consideration in any domain name strategy.

Egypt uses IGF to launch new Arabic Internet domain

stephane.vangelder@indom.com (Stephane Van Gelder) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:46:36 +0100

The 4th Internet Governance Forum meeting is currently under way in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. The country's information technology minister Tarek Kamel took advantage of the spotlight currently being shined on the local Internet community to announce a forthcoming Arabic version of Egypt's national domain.

Pronounced ".MISR" and spelled .مصر in Arabic script, the new TLD translates as "Egypt". It will be applied for as part of ICANN's IDN ccTLD fast-track program which officially launches today.

Using .MISR, local Internet users will no longer have to type any Latin characters (both the domain and its suffix will be in Arabic) to access compatible websites. "Over half the Internet users around the world don’t use a Latin-based script as their native language," said ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom in a separate comment. "IDNs are about making the Internet more global and accessible for everyone."

No launch schedule has yet been released for Egypt's new TLD. But according to ICANN, once the requests are evaluated and approved, IDN ccTLDs are expected to come online during 2010.

Special IDN keyboard with 327 keys!

stephane.vangelder@indom.com (Stephane Van Gelder) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:59:06 +0100

The forthcoming launch of the IDN fast-track for country code Internet extensions has a lot of Internet users around the world eager to be able to use their own character sets and alphabets to surf the Internet, at long last.

But it also has a lot of people worried. One common question: "how will IDN websites be accessed using a standard ASCII keyboard?" Well the guys over at TheSpoof.com have the answer. A special keyboard with 327 keys arranged around the regular keyboard layout and featuring characters from Cyrillic, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic and even American Redneck!

And yes, it is a joke.

Emirates ready to launch Arabic Internet suffix

stephane.vangelder@indom.com (Stephane Van Gelder) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:12:49 +0200

Internet overseer ICANN has set a tentative date for the launch of non-ASCII country code domains, or Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), for example a .RU written in Cyrillic, at November 16. Several countries are already planning to run an IDN TLD.

The latest such plan comes from the United Arab Emirates' Telecom Regulatory Authority TRA with a .EMARAT domain. In Arabic (.امارات), this is the equivalent of the .AE country code which the UAE already uses.

"Our objective is to support Arabic content over the Internet and build a strong identity for UAE and Arab countries across the World Wide Web," says Mohamed Naser Al Ghanim, TRA Director General.

This year, TRA has already launched a campaign to promote the use of its .AE domain and claims that registration levels have increased 30% this year and now stand at a total of 90,000 domains.

IDN ccTLDs set to launch on November 16

stephane.vangelder@indom.com (Stephane Van Gelder) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:51:57 +0200

ICANN's proposed expedited process for the release of non-ASCII character country code domains is about to become reality.

Prior to ICANN's international meeting in Seoul, Korea (Octobre 25-30), the final implementation plan for the IDN ccTLD fast-track has been published. The plan is to allow a limited number of countries to apply for their Internet suffix in their own alphabet, say a .RU in Cyrillic characters instead of the traditional ASCII code.

The fast-track has been in development for several years within the ICANN community and eagerly anticipated by countries such as Russia and China.

Once IDN ccTLDs are launched, Russian Internet users will be able to access websites using only Cyrillic character domain names, as both the name itself and the suffix will be localisable.

ICANN is proposing a November 16 2009 launch date for the fast-track.

Russia to launch Cyrillic national suffix in 2010

stephane.vangelder@indom.com (Stephane Van Gelder) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 19:24:31 +0200

Another news story coming out of the second conference for ccTLD registries and registrars and the many workshops and talks given there by Central and Eastern European registries: Russia is said to be ready to launch the IDN version of .RF (Russian Federation) next summer.

This would probably make Russia one of the first countries to take advantage of ICANN's IDN ccTLD program to create a local-script TLD. The IDN .RF would exist alongside the standard .RU and .SU domains. The Russian registry also revealed plans to harmonise regulations in all three ccTLDs before the end of next year.

China wants a Dot China in Chinese

stephane.vangelder@indom.com (Stephane Van Gelder) — Tue, 12 May 2009 17:41:06 +0200

According to Chinese media, a nationwide campaign has been launched to promote the use of a .CHINA extension in local characters (.中国). Chinese registry officials are quoted as saying that developing this TLD would boost Internet use and popularity in China.

But it's unclear whether the campaign is focusing on an IDN .CHINA TLD, as part of ICANN's current fast track towards the prompt release of local character set TLDs, or if this is a home grown initiative.

One news story says that "so far, 90 percent of national provincial or ministerial-level government organizations, 95 percent of traditional media websites, over 90 percent of the 211-engineering universities, over 50 percent of China's top 100 enterprises and over 40 percent of China's top 500 enterprises have already registered to use the .中国 domain name."

Either we're talking a petition of some kind in support of a .中国 or there's some local scheme to develop a Chinese character domain under the country's ccTLD .CN. The story goes on to say that "it is expected that within the next two years, China's mainstream websites will all be using the .中国 domain name."

Is the IDN ccTLDs fast-track really needed?

stephane.vangelder@indom.com (Stephane Van Gelder) — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 15:54:39 +0100

In 2007, ICANN had a run of "My name, My language, My Internet" t-shirts printed to highlight the launch of a test website for 11 IDN scripts, which made the fast-track possible. The t-shirts had "example.test" written on them in the same 11 scripts.

Last year, ICANN sent 252 letters to the governments and ccTLD managers of the world to let them know that they would soon be able to request an IDN national suffix and asking them if they were interested in obtaining one.

Of the responses received so far - a total of 74, with a small number of respondents requesting confidentiality - 31 were expressions of interest from governments or ccTLD managers (who are generally either under direct government control or affiliated with their national authority in some way).

So that means a little over 12% take-up. Is that enough to justify a special procedure? I don't really think so to be honest, even though the level of interest for IDN extensions actually doesn't seem too bad. But the fast-track that ICANN is planning in order to hasten the launch of IDN ccTLDs while its full IDN program continues to be readied leaves me with a feeling of overkill.

Continue reading "Is the IDN ccTLDs fast-track really needed?"

The problem with IDNs

stephane.vangelder@indom.com (Stephane Van Gelder) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 20:05:22 +0200

ICANN's IDN testbed page for Arabic script.

Last week, ICANN announced that it had added two new languages to its IDN testbed. Bengali and Khmer have thus become scripts number 16 and 17 to be supported as part of ICANN's global IDN experiment.

ICANN is testing IDN TLDs, i.e. a complete domain name written in a non-ASCII format. The Greek IDN test link (http://παράδειγμα.δοκιμή) serves as a good example: not only is the domain name (the left part after the dot) written in Greek, but so is the extension (the right part before the dot).

I see some irony in ICANN pushing its IDN testbed while at the same time, ccTLD managers are finding it harder and harder to decide what to do with IDNs. In July, the Belgium registry DnsBE announced that, having consulted the community, it had decided not to go ahead with an IDN implementation at this time.

And last week, at an AFNIC meeting, I learned that IDNs were not included in the French registry's action plan for 2009. That means no IDNs for .FR before 2010 at the earliest.

Admittedly, several European registries, including the Germans, the Swiss and the Austrians, have already launched IDNs. But I can't help thinking that IDNs are creating as many problems as they are solving, and that is why registries are having trouble implementing them. We can only hope that ICANN's current experimentation will lead to a simpler, more intuitive IDN system. That would increase the chances for widespread IDN adoption.

Unfortunately, there's some doubt cast on that as well. I was at a Eurolinc meeting last week (an organisation that promotes multilingualism on the Internet) and IDNs were discussed by technical people who know a lot more about them than I do. The consensus seemed to be that the current IDNA protocol, upon which ICANN's testbed is based and which relies on a form of coding called punycode to translate IDNs into ASCII-compatible data, is problematic. One suggestion I heard: dump punycode and use only UTF8 coding. A practical solution? I don't know to be honest, but it's nice to see people working an alternative ideas to make IDNs happen.