CNN Spotlights IDN Domain Names in a New Segment

[sprewellpj]

A nice piece on IDNs and their potential impact on the Internet:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgQ16...layer_embedded

[stbmax]

Nice!...I hear the Saudi Arabian IDN landrush is coming soon.
U.A.E. , Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Egypt, have been given approval for insertion in the root, and the lineup to apply, is getting bigger.
Good News!

[therunner]

see!!! I have said in other threads...people think the domains are not in English word or .com they are worthless...2010.ru where sold around $800,000 and people in this forum were saying the buyer had clueless about this...the future will be ccTLD, where the .com value will decrease the vaule little by little...small business are not able to pay thousands for a domain and spend more thousands to develope it...SEO is taking over more and more, I have seen web page with
PR1 or PR2 in google or yahoo where their domains and extension could be worthless...direct navigations were used before, but now, many people use google, yahoo or other kind of search engine to find what they are looking for, and these search engines are getting more locally and adapting the language where their IP are...sorry if many people could get mad because of this, but this is the new future the domainer will be facing off

[sprewellpj]

I agree that IDN ccTLDs will be very successful, but so will IDN.com names. In the CNN piece, Tina Dam said: "Just as we’re used to seeing .com today and .info . . . those can become internationalized as well, so that will be one of the next steps."

[webnameking]

If international scripts are used in a domain, why would latin extensions like .com be preferred? I think IDNs will be big when extensions become the same script and language as the domain. Investing in a .com IDN may not pay off once the non-latin extensions become available.

[sprewellpj]

@webnameking- fantastic question, and this was actually precisely the concern that kept me from investing in IDNs until recently. But here's why I now buy IDN.com:

1. Verisign and ICANN are moving towards a plan that lets IDN.com owners own an equivalent IDN name but with the .com extension translated in the language that corresponds to the IDN. This is known as "aliasing" or "unlocking". (See link: http://idnblog.com/2009/12/03/exclus...omes-verisign/ and the CNN video here: http://idnblog.com/2010/05/03/intern...p-cnn-segment/)

2. It is actually very easy for natives to switch over on their keyboards between foreign scripts and latin scripts, and according to Google, many of their searches are a combination of English and foreign characters (in the same search phrase).

3. .Com is a trillion dollar brand that benefits from tons of corporations' advertising. I'd prefer to leverage this branding advantage over newer ccTLDs.