OK a post to clear up lot of misunderstanding i've been regarding on Verisign's choices for Chinese .com (.??) and .net (.??). 1) As with all the other strings Versign has applied for in IDN, they all are transliterations of .com or .net. They have not applied for .company or .network in any other languages, so

Historic day for the internet today with the announcement of 1930 applications for new gTLDs. Among these 116 were IDN applications. Some notable numbers were 73 applications for Chinese IDN gTLDs, 15 Arabic, 9 Japanese ?and only 3 Korean gTLDs. Verisign applied for the 12 IDNs in different "transliteration" of COM (Thai, Japanese, Hebrew, Arabic, ...

With the big push in promotion for the use of Chinese domain names (especially by local governments), many companies that have found out late about IDNs are finding that their chosen domain names are already taken, and in many cases held by cyber-squatters. According to the statistics of the China International Economic and Trade Arbitration Commis...

Tired of seeing punycode in the address bar of firefox. Many people have complained of firefox's policy of a IDN whitelist, below is the information from mozilla on how to whitelist an domain extension, so all domains of this extension will show IDNs instead of the punycode. This is a list of top-level domains (TLDs) for

Don't know what IDNs are? Don't see why international domain names are needed? Just saw this great video produced by ICANN for the first time. A great introduction by ICANN as to what IDNs are and why they are so important.

2010: Prediction for the coming year – Chinese domain industry A list of 10 predictions made by Chinese netizens about what 2010 holds for the Chinese domaining industry. 1, Total .cn domain name registrations will likely reduce in numbers by year-end to less than 10 million 2, Chinese domain names ".??" registrations is expected to exceed o...

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has approved Telnic?s request to offer internationalized domain names on .tel. .Tel registry Telnic made the request to offer IDNs on December 2, and ICANN Chief gTLD Registry Liaison Craig Schwartz notified Telnic of approval today via letter. By offering IDN domain names, users will be able to r...

The characters ".bg" and ".bgr" are the most popular for Bulgaria's national internet address in Cyrillic, according to the results of an online poll conducted by the Ministry of Transport, Information Technologies and Communications (MTITC) in December 2009. Parvan Rusinov, Deputy Minister, has announced the poll results on Monday. He said that th...

As of February 1st 2010 registration of domain names with special characters in them, like for example a letter with an accent, called Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) .lu will be possible. Acceptable special caracters are those communly used in Luxembourgish, German and French languages. There will be a two months sunrise period between Febru...

Hong Kong Internet Registration Corporation Ltd (HKIRC) announced today that ?.??? registrations will be offered free to all ?.hk? customers in the second half of 2010 with the aim of helping them develop their sites with full Chinese domain names. This is to increase the popularity of Chinese domain names and to maximize benefits to

Pinyin, Romaji and Romanized Domains could get Priority to Register in IDN December 15, 2009 — Hong Kong? — Following the announcement on November 18, 2009 (http://www.idn.asia/main/2009/11/dotasia-to-launch-internationalized- domain-names-idn-in-2010.html), DotAsia today published a draft of the IDN launch policies for discussion.? Th...

On 3 November 2009, SGNIC announced the launch of Chinese Domain Names (CDNs). The launch will take place in the following phases: Phase #1: Government Applications 23 Nov 2009 – 31 Dec 2009 Phase #2: Trademark Owners Applications 7 Jan 2010 – 18 Feb 2010 Sunrise: 25 Mar 2010 – 6 May 2010 General Launch: 10 June 2010 onwards Regis...

ICANN is pleased to provide the following status report on the progress of implementation of the IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process. Overall, the implementation is tracking to the project plan and it is planned to be submitted to the Board during the ICANN meeting in Korea, Seoul, 26-30 October 2009. Discussion of the implementation plan

An advertisement using a Chinese IDN: ???.cn (translates to Ambroxol) recently seen on Sina.com. Advertisement is for pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim.

The company that manages domain registrations .bg has announced that it is now possible to register .bg websites in the Cyrillic alphabet. Register.BG stated Monday that from today any company wanting a .bg registration will be able to register a Cyrillic Internet address. The only requirement for those who want to have a Cyrillic domain name in...

iResearch Consulting a leading Chinese internet research company, has released an interesting report on domain usage in China for 2008.? The report portrays IDNs in a somewhat negative light, stating that English language domains are still greatly favoured over IDNs and IDNs have so far failed to make a impact. It is of course, pretty

The largest recorded sale of an IDN for the month of 2009 was for the domain N?.com (xn--n-eha.com), a turkish or danish word meaning either nude or now, which exchanged hands in a private sale for $14,200. Other sales for the month of August included: Domain Name Punycode Translation Language Date of Sale Price ($) Venue of Sale gartenm?bel.t...

"China has solved most of the technical problems raised by Chinese-language domain names and is in the process of deploying them" – Zhang Jian (director of the international business department) at China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). Zhang Jian states that within two years, the agency expects all mainstream Web sites in the cou...

Probably the first country to adopt IDNs and widely use them is Germany. The Germans have a large number of IDNs registered and in use, and there is an active market already for IDNs in both there country's ccTLD .de and other major TLDs such as .com, .net and .biz. Today DENIC, the manager of the

Afilias will work with the CDNC to coordinate and collaborate with other registries to reach Chinese language Internet users with Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) technology. BEIJING–(BUSINESS WIRE) - Aug. 06, 2009– Afilias, a global provider of Internet infrastructure services, today announced that it has joined the Chinese Domain N...

A post at Idnforums shows that IDNs are fairly well represented in their top 1,000,000 list. While alexa is pretty much useless in trying to get any meaningful stats from, i still think that it positively shows that IDNs are being developed into meaningful visited sites, that are being regularly visited or searched. With browser support

The IDN aftermarket continues to grow quickly, with sales picking up on IDN forums in recent days. Sales yesterday included: Russian GEO - ????.com (Sochi) - SOLD for $21,555USD on idnchannel.com - Punycode: xn--h1aliz.com - Russian resort city, with population: 402,043 (2007), set to host the XXII Olympic Winter Games in 2014. - Official olympics ...

Chinese market definetely seems to heating up with alot of healthy sales for expired .cn IDN domain names. Sales are taking place at ebname.cn and 66.cn, who are operating under contract from CNNIC for dropping .cn IDNs. Sales from the last month include: ??.cn (plane tickets) - US$7,159 ?.cn (net/network) - US$7034 ???.cn (second-hand cars) - US$5...

By Wagdy Sawahel for Intellectual Property Watch

The EAI working group of the IETF has finished (part of) its work on the interationalization of email addresses. This, together with Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) will make it possible to send email messages to non-7 bit ASCII addresses e.g. m?tte@k?benhavn.dk or ??@??.?? . There are 3 RFCs, covering changes to the SMTP protocol, e-mail mess...

As Local Language Domain Names Gain Traction, VeriSign Helps Internet Sites Everywhere Reassure Users with World?s Most Recognized Trust Mark Seven of every 10 people in the world don?t speak English, but that isn?t keeping them from using the Internet. Now, domain name registrants and Web site operators not only can reach users in their own

??.com, Chinese for bank.com just sold on snapnames for $21,022. A bargain for the buyer, and great news for Chinese IDNs especially .com's which have recently seen a number of decent sale prices.