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Garden furniture equates to impressive IDN sale
Saturday, January 2. 2010
Egypt uses IGF to launch new Arabic Internet domain
Monday, November 16. 2009
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!
Friday, November 6. 2009
Emirates ready to launch Arabic Internet suffix
Tuesday, October 20. 2009
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
Wednesday, October 7. 2009
Russia to launch Cyrillic national suffix in 2010
Monday, September 7. 2009
China wants a Dot China in Chinese
Tuesday, May 12. 2009
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?
Wednesday, February 11. 2009
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
Monday, October 13. 2008
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.
