VeriSign’s Plans for “.Com IDNs” Become Clearer

[memmst]

From: http://domainnamewire.com/2010/02/26/verisigns-plans-for-com-idns-become-clearer/

Registrants of existing .com domain names are well positioned for coming release of IDN TLDs.

For years, domainers have been investing in Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) that use non-Latin characters. But these have all been IDN at the second level only, as there currently aren’t any top level domain names in non-Latin characters. So an internet user has to type the second level domain using one character set and then append “.com” to the end.

But that’s about to change, beginning with a select number of IDN country code domain names. Then, if everything goes as planned, entities will be able to apply for generic top level domain names in different scripts as part of the new gTLD process.

So what does this mean for people who bought idn.com domain names? They were banking on .com registry VeriSign getting the rights to “.com equivalents” in other scripts and languages and offering those to the existing registrants of IDN.com. As of right now, that looks like a good bet.