[icann-eu] Domains with Accent or Umlaut

[Marc Schneiders <marc@schneiders.org>]

In a few days not only Chinese and other Asian language, but also
German, French, Spanish (and Danish and Dutch etc.) character domain
names will be available ...(see forwarded message below) As far as I
have followed this (Chinese did not capture my appetite so far), these
domains do not work yet anywhere (as the message seems to say).

Now it is getting closer to us in Europe, I begin to find the whole
procedure very weird. People are in a way forced to protect their
name, e.g. in Germany, when there is an Umlaut in it, and pay, while
this is officially still an experiment, not at all sanctioned (if I
understand it) by ICANN. But I would be surprised if it were decided
at a later stage, that the experiment does not become "real". So a
company is cashing in already by way of experiment. Should this be
acceptable to ICANN? 

What do the ALM directors think?

Marc Schneiders

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2001 23:03:52 -0500
From: replies@opensrs.org
Subject: OpenSRS Live Reseller Update - 02/21/01

[...]

Multilingual domain names - now with 70 languages
----------------------------------- 

On February 26th, 2001, Tucows will make gTLD domain name
registrations in 70 new languages and their dialects available to its
reseller channel. These languages include German, Spanish, Portuguese
and French This is part of the Verisign Registry Supported
Multilingual Testbed of which Tucows is a certified Registrar.

Full List of Supported Languages:

·Latin-1 provides support for characters used by Danish, Dutch, Faeroese,
Finnish, Flemish, German, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Norwegian,
Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish.

·Latin Extended-A provides support for characters used by Afrikaans, Basque,
Breton, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Esperanto, Estonian, French, Frisian,
Greenlandic, Hungarian, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish,
Provental, Rhaeto-Romanic, Romanian, Romany, Sami, Slovak, Slovenian,
Serbian, Turkish, Welsh, and others.

·Latin Extended-B provides support for characters used by Saxon, Zulu,
Pan-Nigerian, Zhuang, African, Azerbaijani, Pan-Turkic, Norse, Bini, Esoko,
Edo, Skolt Sami, Khoisan, Croatian digraphs, Pinyin, Livonian, Iroquoian, Old
Icelandic, Slovenian and Croatian additions, Romanian additions, Middle
English, Scots, Algonquin and Huron.

· Greek
· Cyrillic
· Armenian
· Georgian

In Q4 2000, when the first three languages, Chinese, Korean and
Japanese, were released, more than 800,000 multilingual domains were
registered. On February 26, 2001, a total of 70 different languages
will be available for the first time.

In order to meet market needs, and to protect resellers not interested
in multilingual domains, Tucows is planning to release a special
Multilingual Bulk Order feature within the Reseller Web Interface
(RWI). This will allow resellers, who are interested in multilingual
domains, to submit their customers’ Multilingual domains in bulk.

The price for the new multilingual domain names will be $12 USD per
domain year and they can be registered for 1 to 10 years. The actual
time on the day of the launch that registrations will become available
is yet to be determined by Verisign. As soon as this information
becomes available Tucows will make an announcement to its reseller
channel.

Please note that VeriSign has not provided a firm date for the
resolution of domain names utilizing these new character sets. Until
the resolution phase has been successfully completed, Tucows strongly
advises that our resellers make their customers aware there is a risk
the names may not resolve.

Tucows' resellers will be able to submit registration requests, on
behalf of their customers, by utilizing the enhanced Bulk Multilingual
Order capability in the RWI.  Starting Monday February 26th, at a time
to be determined, this feature will be accessible by logging into
http://resellers.opensrs.net

[...]