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This Austin restaurant uses an internationalized domain name

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Note the accent mark in this domain name.

A domain industry friend was in Austin this morning and we met up for breakfast. When scheduling a place to meet, I googled the name of a local bakery to get its details. I did a double take when I saw its domain name:

Address bar of browser

Notice the accent mark above café?

This is technically the internationalized domain name xn--sanfranciscobakeryandcaf-yfc.com

I was surprised to see a restaurant adopt an IDN. I wonder if they copied-and-pasted their name into the registrar search box when they chose the domain. (I tried to talk to the owner this morning but he was too busy making pastries.)

I doubt this restaurant has many people typing in its domain name. If they did, few people would land on the website because most wouldn’t include the accent. To be honest, it seems that domains are an afterthought for this business. A shorter domain printed on the bakery’s menu has expired and, when you search on Google, a Weebly subdomain site also pops up.

Clearly, this restaurant isn’t too worried about its web presence. It’s been around for a while and counts on repeat business.

Still, I thought it was interesting to see a U.S. restaurant using an IDN.

Verisign: we’re not afraid of new TLDs, and IDN transliterations will be delayed

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A defense of .com’s staying power and bad news for IDN.com investors.

On its investor conference call yesterday afternoon, Verisign CEO James Bidzos explained why he isn’t afraid of new top level domain names. Also, in a blow to IDN.com investors, the company said it will take a longer for them to hit the market than many are hoping for.

New TLDs? We’re not afraid of those!

Despite Verisign’s never-ending tactics to delay new top level domain names, Bidzos told an analyst that he’s not really worried about how new TLDs will affect the .com base and he explained how .com will remain king. Here’s his explanation:

So for example, you may have seen that the U.K. paper, dailymail.co.uk, a very typical English configuration for a web address, using a company dot U.K. configuration. So dailymail.co.uk purchased dailymail.com. They said that they purchased it because they wanted something that was more global that would allow them to get more traffic, especially in the U.S. They paid GBP 1 million for it. They bought it from The Charleston Daily Mail of Charleston, West Virginia, a 100-year-old Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper, who after they got their roughly $1.6 million for that domain name, were free to go out and buy whatever they wanted. Then they chose to go out and buy charlestondailymail.com. If they bought it for retail, they probably paid about $10 for it. So I think .com is very much the preferred, established reliable name. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future with the TLDs. I’m sure some of them will do well, they’ll build some community. But I guess I can give you one data point. If we look at — look back, this is not the first time this has happened. There have been some new TLDs before, and one of them that I think actually is a good idea of what success what might look like, a good example would be .co. And I’m sure a lot of you are familiar with it. .co is a short name, it’s just 2 letters. It’s a meaningful name, it’s linked to company. They went live in July of 2010. They had a very robust marketing partner, they partnered with Go Daddy, the largest registrar. They did 3 Super Bowl ads. They did, I thought, a very good job of marketing. They did partner with Go Daddy on 3 Super Bowl commercials. They have a substantial marketing budget. They had no gTLD competition when they came out. And they’re not ICANN-regulated because they’re operating under contract from the ccTLD .co for Colombia.

So their history was that when they went live in July of 2010, they registered 100,000 domains in the first 10 minutes that they were live. Less than a year later, in June of 2011, they had reached 1 million domains. During that same period, by the way, that 11-month period, .com registered about 7 million. Just under 2 years later, by April of 2013, they had gone from 1 million to 1.5 million, so they added 500,000 domains during those 2 years. During that period, .com added 13.2 million. And then from April of 2013 until December 31 of last year, they added another 90,000 names, they closed the year at 1.59 million. .com added another 3.5 million during that time. I think they’ve done a great job with .co. I think they’ve been successful there. They ended the year at 1.59 million domains. Their growth has slowed a bit, obviously. But in Q3, we added 1.55 million names, that’s the entire size of the .co zone. We added that in one quarter. We typically have 5x the size of their zone in gross adds in a quarter. So I think with somewhere in the neighborhood of, I don’t know, 400 or 500 gTLDs that are non-brand that’ll be distributed, it’s going to be a little bit more crowded. They’re obviously more specialized and different. I’m not sure where that’s going to end up, but I do know that we have at least one data point, so I think we’ve coexisted well and done well with .co, and I’m sure we will with the other gTLDs. And I’m sure there’ll be a lot of excitement as they roll out over the course of 2014. But we — what we described as impacting our zone in the first quarter is what we see, some registrar behavior and also some economic headwinds that we’re seeing in Asia.

The last sentence refers to the fact that Verisign saw slowing zone growth in January. It is blaming this on international markets as well as registrars not pushing discounted .com domains as much and instead focusing on pushing bundles.

But perhaps the fact that registrars are pushing new TLDs instead of .com is also hurting .com?

True, most registrars still serve up .com number one, but GoDaddy’s home page is pushing customers to new TLDs, not .com.

Sorry IDN investors, you’re going to have to wait.

I have bad news for those IDN investors patiently waiting for .com transliterations. You’re collateral damage.

Here’s the deal. Verisign has been invited to contracting for 12 of 14 names. Pat Kane, SVP of Naming and Directory Services, said it’s going to take a while to get through the negotiating process.

Part of this is because it’s trying to do something novel by offering domains to the existing .com owner. But it also has to do with name collisions, which is one of the FUD topics Verisign is using to try to slow new TLDs.

Given Verisign’s testy relations with ICANN right now, its efforts to delay new TLDs overall (despite apparently not being worried about them) and its additional asks for the contract, I suspect it’s going to be quite some time before the IDN transliterations see the light of day.

Intellectual Property

One final note from the conference call. James Bidzos said the company continues to work on its plan to monetize intellectual property. But his timeline and update is the same it has always has been: we’re progressing, he’s not going to say how soon it will happen (other than not right now) and the plan is still under wraps.

How right-to-left domain names work in practice

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Depending on your language, new TLDs might be about new opportunities to the left of the dot.

When ICANN unveiled the list of top level domain name applications at a media event in London last summer, some in the community were upset that Arabic IDNs were presented left to right instead of right to left.

Some scripts, including Arabic and Hebrew, are read from right to left.

This really hit home for me a couple weeks ago when I was writing about the registry agreement for شبكة. Whenever I paste that into WordPress, the cursor jumps to the left of the word instead of the right.

So how does this work in practice? If a language is to be read from right to left, is the top level domain not “right of the dot”?

Indeed, that’s the case.

I reached out to a couple companies to learn more about this.

ARI Registry Services provided some concrete examples.

As it turns out, most major browsers have localized versions. These versions handle the scripts, accounting for reading right to left.

Here’s an example for the already delegated country code domain امارات. or .emarat. This is from the aeDA’s (.ae Domain Administration) web site:

arabic-idn

The second level domain is to the far right, followed to the left by dot, then the top level domain, and / directory page URL.

If you imagine Domain Name Wire in Arabic, this page:

domainnamewire.com/about

would look something like

tuoba/moc.eriwemanniamod

So in some countries, right now they aren’t getting excited about expanding opportunities to the right of the dot. Instead, they’re buzzing about expanding to the left of the dot.

.Co to offer Asian IDNs starting April 15

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More .co internationalized domain name options available this month.

dot co.Co Internet announced that it will begin allowing registrations of Asian language .co IDNs starting April 15.

Registrations will be available in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. There will be no trademark sunrise period, so brand owners that wish to register their IDN.co domain should place an order with their registrar quickly.

This isn’t .co’s first foray into internationalized domain names. In January it started offering Icelandic, Danish, Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian domains.

.Co, technically the country code of Colombia, was rebranded as a general purpose top level domain in 2010. As of late last month there are over 1.5 million .co domains registered.

IDN community reacts to Verisign’s .com transliteration selections

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The good, the bad, and the ugly of Verisign’s IDN plans.

Verisign applied for 12 internationalized top level domain names as part of the new TLD program.

These domain names are transliterations of .com and .net.

A transliteration is different from a translation. Transliteration maps the sounds of one language to the best matching script of another. For example, コム when said aloud will sound like “com”, and is only possible because those two characters are phonetic sounds that construct the “com” sound.

Investors in internationalized domain names have been banking on Verisign’s applications for IDNs for years. Verisign plans to allow registrants of domain names in the IDN.com format to “unlock” IDN.IDN.

For example, let’s say a domain name right now has Hebrew text at the second level. It would look like [Hebrew].com. So someone typing in the domain has to switch scripts when they get to the top level. When unlocked, the domain could be [Hebrew].[.com-translisteration-in-Hebrew]. This would all be in one script.

IDN investors say that people have been typing in IDN.IDN-in-dot-com for years, and they point to data from the old Overture tool as well as Google as proof. They think this will expand greatly as IDN.com-transliteration is introduced.

Right now there are just under one million IDN.com domains registered. Many of these were registered by investors who think the domains will be valuable after they get access to IDN.IDN.

But now that Verisign’s applications are public, what do these investors think? Some say they were surprised by the results.

What follows was written by a collaboration of IDN investors, many of whom discuss IDNs on IDNForums.com. These opinions are not necessarily mine, and of course there may also be debate amongst IDN investors….

First the good news:

ком

* Transliteration of com in Cyrillic (Russian, Ukrainian etc) script
* This is what was expected, a thumbs up to Verisign

コム

* Transliteration of com in Japanese
* This is what was expected, a thumbs up to Verisign

คอม

* Transliteration of com in Thai
* This is what was expected, a thumbs up to Verisign

कॉम

* Transliteration of com in Devanagari (Hindi) script
* This is what was expected, a thumbs up to Verisign

This next application, while on the surface looks ok, may actually shut off a few hundred million target customers from Verisign’s reach

كوم

* Transliteration of com in Arabic script
* There is a debate raging as to whether the variant section should have been completed in the application, as Urdu/Farsi use a very similar if not the same looking string. If this is an error, then it cost verisign a few hundred million target customers
* But for the transliteration itself, it’s what was expected, so it’s a thumbs up for Verisign

This next application borders on the unbelievable

קוֹם

* Supposed to be the Transliteration of com in Hebrew
* The character with the little dot should be the same character without the dot (קום). In fact to type this character the user would first have to type the correct character, then switch to CAPS, Hit Shift, then the minus sign, then switch back from CAPS. It should be a 3 keystroke string, but now it’s 7, and native Hebrew speakers are saying they wouldn’t know even how to type it
* It’s a fail on this one, massive thumbs down

(Note: Verisign has acknowledged the error on the Hebrew IDN and is working to fix it.)

These next applications are questionable, and the jury is still out on them.

닷컴

* Supposed to be the equivalent of com in Hangul (Korean script)
* In the Korean language, the ideal way to say com would be a single character 컴, but ICANN disallowed single character gTLDs (even though in many languages a single character can represent a word or even a whole sentence)
* So Verisign has applied for “dotcom” and given the restrictions Verisign had to work with, it’s ok, but just ok

These next 2 applications open a huge can of worms.

点看 and 點看

* Supposed to represent com in Chinese
* Unlike most of the other languages above, Chinese doesn’t have transliteration, so there is no natural way to say “com”
* However for many years, many people have assumed that Verisign would use this 公司 – it’s the translation for “company”
* But verisign didn’t apply for 公司, in fact CNNIC (China’s internet body) did. Some of us saw this coming. Back in 2008, CNNIC split the root and resolved 公司 only within china by covertly mapping .公司 to 公司.cn and .com.cn
* Some people are crying foul play here, suggesting Verisign gave up intellectual property, gave in to the Chinese, and let registrants down.
* Before we criticize the Chinese too much, lets remember why they split the root in the first place. It was out of pure frustration with ICANN for dragging its heels for over a decade on this, and now the problem has come full circle. ICANN, I expect, would like nothing more than to pretend this problem doesn’t exist, and simply award CNNIC their genuine extension and allow them to legitimize their alternate root. That sounds like a bad precedent to set.
* With regards the 2 Chinese gTLDs that verisign have applied for, they appear to be poor and a far distant 2nd choice, time will only tell how well they will be adopted

Editor’s note: Again, I’d like to stress that this analysis of VeriSign’s IDNs was prepared by a community of IDN experts. I don’t necessarily agree or disagree with it.