Internationalized domain names or IDNs made a lot of water go under the bridge before the possibility of using. Do you remember the Verisign “tests” that almost near two years ago, pushed a big number of companies to protect themselves by putting aside stressed dominion names they never needed? Nowadays, from the ICANN meeting of Montreal (see DomaiNews nº8) because of innumerous experts works, they established certain kind of clear rules as much as technical and politic level: ccTLD from Japan (jp) and the gTLD .info managed by Afilias were the first in declare themselves but Europe did that all waited for it.

The delay, henceforth is full. On November 24th in an original initiative, ccTLDs representing three different communities of local Internet took the compromised together, in order to propose the international domain names. They would bear specific characters of German language from March 1st. Between them, .DE leading this like a strong actor since it is the most powerful in terms of registered names, and also .AT from Austria, .LI representing “Lichtenstein” and .CH from Helvetica Confederation. With the using of certain characters like “Umlaut” (German language inflection) or dieresis, German names will be able to register in all, for example, ”shröde.de” and at list they will be able to replace the horrible ”shroede.de” used until now. But beyond the typical specifications from German language, they are actually 31 characters that the three registers will suffer from March, including our French stresses and our cedilla! Of course, the Swiss francophone would love this! Waiting that AFNIC controls the problem for .FR, in association with .CA from Quebec, who knows?

See http://www.denic.de/de/denic/news/news_6.html ]- [http://www.switch.ch/fr/id/idn/chars.html (in French)

JCV & SB