valuenames said:
IDNs have value, but question is how much ... for marketing an IDN makes sense - easier to remember, etc.
Drawbacks of IDNs is they are built on a kludge.............
Ron
Ron,
Thanks for that! Most reasoned argument against IDN that I have heard yet!
Yes, the when is a dot com a dot com argument has not been fully resolved, but my guess is that dot com will as it has up until now follow the example of what is going to be the biggest IDN market China. I don't personally believe that you will have dot com and a host of "IDN dot coms" operating beside each other as separate registries.
China already operates ML versions of dot CN, so that the kludge is avoided, but dot com like just coca cola is recognized internationally anyway. Just as Simplified and Traditional Chinese Domains have been linked and now cannot be double booked, I believe that there will be just one dot com with many different representations that all resolve to the same registry, otherwise it would be a trademark war zone. Those that hold the dot com now will therefore and legally would in any case have rights over any IDN equivalent.
The point is though that only the current version is dot com, whatever happens!
As far as value is concerned, it is difficult to put a value on single alphabetic character domains as there English Equivalents are largely reserved by IANA and therefore will never come to market! With three quarters of the Arabic Alphabet, a similar proportion of the Davanegari Alphabet and Single Numerals, the biggest collection of popular Japanese Hirigana Characters and endless highly used single Chinese Glyphs and a few single Russian Cyrillics, even if they are only worth a few thousand each, that already make me a multi-millionaire on paper.
I must admit I get a bit fed up with US-Centric approach of most domainers. Dot de is already proving that it is mainly to market size and importance that is the main determinant of domain value. China will be no different, except that like the US most of the focus to date has been on Dot Com, and China will of course be not only the largest market but also the largest economy.
I remember when dot CN first came out as a second level domain, there was great skepticism as to whether it could compete with .com.cn., yet it eclipsed it in no time, and nobody with any brain would register .com.cn as first choice now. How quickly things can change. China is heavily promoting IDN version of dot CN, but as dot com is the biggest TDL in China the spill over is obvious. I already have dozens of domains that have traffic in three figures each month and I would expect that to grow exponentially over the next few years.
It is difficult to see why when type-in is the greatest measure of value in the US, the same property in an IDN would mean worthless.
Regards
Dave Wrixon
