Company will apply for about a dozen TLDs, mostly transliterations of .com.
VeriSign plans to apply for “about 12” top level domain names this year, Pat Kane, Senior Vice President and General Manager of VeriSign Naming Services, said on VeriSign’s investor conference call this evening. Most of these will be transliterations of .com. In other words, internationalized domain names (IDNs).
Although he did not elaborate on what those domains would be, Kane previously told Domain Name Wire that you can expect .com equivalents in Japanese, Hangul, Chinese, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Hebrew.
The company also said that VeriSign has already been selected as the registry provider by several brands that will apply for new top level domains. It did not reveal any numbers, although the company has predicted there will be 1,000 to 1,500 total new TLD applications.
Hopefully there is no additional charge for these transliterations.. If there is then that is messed up.
@ JJ – plan is to charge an “unlock” fee. Makes sense…VeriSign has to pay for the new TLDs.
There most definitely will be. Verisign aren’t a charity you know.
Current registrant of Пример.com will have to pay if they want to use Пример.ком
Chuck Gomes (Vice President of Policy and Compliance for VeriSign): The process planned by VeriSign does not involve aliasing although the result might look like aliasing. Under the approach we are planning, if you are the registrant of Krawitz.com, no one else could register Krawitz.com-in-IDN; you could activate the registration of Krawitz.com-in-IDN if you wanted to. That would apply to any IDN versions of .com that we offer. Similarly, if you were the registrant of Krawitz-in-IDN.com, then no one else could register Krawitz-in-IDN.com-in-IDN but you could activate the registration it if you wanted to.
http://idnblog.com/2009/12/03/exclusive-qa-chuck-gomes-verisign/
We’ve been “beta testing” for years as ICANN’s official guinea pigs.. You’d think they’d do us a favor ;P