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Originally Posted by Doc Com  I've got the time, and patience, and money to renew. Already seeing an increase. Not stellar, but positive.
When the browsers come up to speed, there will be an increase in usage. But it will take time to get the word out and widespread usage.
The recent trial by ICANN...any early reports or results coming in yet? |
Nothing is certain except that IDNs are on their way to mainstream use in many shapes and sizes. They will probably come in the form of idn.ascii and idn.idn. Verisign it appears will control .com, .net and anything "strikingly or confusingly similar" in any language or extension. Verisign last year put forth a concept for aliasing called DNAME but seems it is not getting majority support so far since other options are also on the table.
The various Country codes "might" be allowed their own decision as to aliasing existing extensions to .idn, or keeping them as is, or even creating all NEW .idn extensions. Most of the IDN meetings were behind closed doors in Los Angeles last week so not much news. My take is that ICANN is trying to listen to each coutries wishes and in some fashion please everyone. That may be an impossible task and in the end add years to getting idn.idn online in some languages.
On a positive note, the only item missing to get IDNs truly "on a roll" is IE7 deployment in China, Japan, Thailand, Korea, etc. That will almost "for sure" happen in (hopefully) early/mid 2008, and should provide the impetus for idn.com, idn.net, idn.jp, idn.cn, idn.biz, etc. etc. to get into mainstream use.
Once those take foothold and get popular websites under them, the timetable for idn.idn may not much matter.