.ES IDN's Go Live in October...

[companyone]

Proper Spanish, coming to a URL near you


Spanish speakers have gotten used to seeing their language take a beating when it comes to URLs, since such common accents and even an entire letter -- the beloved Ñ -- have previously been unavailable for use in our browser address bar. Given the constraint, concessions have been made over the years, or people have simply had to call their website something else so as not to risk embarassment in the form of words like year becoming anus. But that's all going to change now, as the Spanish government has labored to get the standards changed to accommodate the proper use of the language on URLs, as well as the characters associated with the other languages of Spain (Catalan, Valencian, Euskera and Galician):

Red.es, the industry in charge of domain registry in Spain, has informed the 62 accredited registry agents to allow names with the the characters 'á', '�*', 'é', 'è', '�*', 'ï' 'ó', 'ò', 'ú', 'ü', 'ñ', 'ç' y 'l.l'.

The initiative will go into effect in October, and there's already worry of speculation. As with prime real estate, there are just thousands of people out there waiting to snatch up previously unregistered URLs. Imagine the value of a site called "niños.com" (which when you type into a browser now, redirects to xn--nios-hqa.com) to a baby products company, or "elpa�*s.com" to newspaper El Pa�*s (previously found at elpais.com -- without the accent on the "i").

With so much at stake, they've set up a way to make sure vultures don't swoop down and take all the prime domain names. Priority will be given to holders of URLs already registered with the .es extension (for Spain) to register for the proper spelling or punctuation of their name, and a live auction will be held online in the case of disputed URLs, according to Spain's El Pa�*s (or El Pais).

El Pa�*s seems to imply that this only applies to sites in Spain. What isn't clear to me is where this leaves domain holders who don't have the .es extension for their sites. Will this apply to people with sites ending in .com or .com.mx, for instance? This measure is needed not only in Spain but in the rest of the Spanish-speaking world. Source