2010 will see the launch of fully operational IDN extensions under a small number of ccTLDs. How will this impact on IP owners?

Fast Track ccTLD IDNS

The ICANN Board approved an “Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) Fast Track Process” at its Open Meeting in Seoul, Korea on 30 October 2009. As a result, domain names featuring non-Latin characters before and after “the dot” are expected to appear in 2010 for a small number of ccTLD registries (Country Code Top Level Domain).

This process is a first step towards introducing full IDNS across the domain name system meaning at both gTLD and ccTLD registries. Eventually there will even be new gTLDs in IDN scripts when that process launches in 2010 or 2011.

"The coming introduction of non-Latin characters represents the biggest technical change to the Internet since it was created four decades ago," said ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush. "Right now Internet address endings are limited to Latin characters (A to Z, the numbers 0 - 9 and the hyphen). The Fast Track Process is the first step in bringing the 100,000 characters of the languages of the world online for domain names."

ICANN's Fast Track Process launches on 16 November 2009. It will allow nations and territories to apply for Internet extensions reflecting their name, made up of characters from their national language. If the applications meet criteria that includes government and community support and a stability evaluation, the applicants will be approved to start accepting full IDN registrations.

In February 2009, as part of a process that has been running for over two years, 18 national governments expressed an initial interest in applying for a Fast Track IDN. Of these 18, only six operators of the local ccTLD – namely Bulgaria, Egypt, Mongolia, Russia, Sweden and Tunisia – initially indicated readiness to participate. It is probably that this is now a longer list, though it should be noted that the Fast Track Process has been designed for “a limited number of non-contentious applications”.

It is the responsibility of the respective territory’s local Internet community (which generally means the Government agency working in tandem with the ccTLD operator) to, among other things:
· identify the script and official language to be used in the domain name
· select the domain name which is a meaningful representation of the territory
· document the endorsement of the selected domain name, the script and language to be used.
· appoint or select an IDN ccTLD manager (delegate) or identify the relevant public authority to perform the role until one is selected
· prepare a language table that describes the list of eligible letters or characters required to express the official language

"The launch of the Fast Track Process will be an amazing change to make the Internet an even more valuable tool, and for even more people around the globe." said Tina Dam, ICANN's Senior Director for IDNs. Whilst her enthusiasm will be shared by the many people in the world whose working language does not feature the Latina alphabet, there are many questions for IP owners to ponder:
· How will the registry operators launch an IDN.IDN domain? Will the owners of marks in the current registry be “grandfathered” (offered priority registration) under the new extension? Will there be Sunrises? Will premium names carry high prices?
· How long will it take for IDN.IDN domains to function properly? Will they be recognised by firewalls, search engines, browsers on launch?
· In certain scripts, a single character (or a combination of two or three characters) can invoke a phrase a concept or even a place name. Once registrations such as these begin appearing, how are non-native speakers going to interpret them?
· For mark owners who wish to protect terms under an IDN.IDN extension, will it be best to translate, to find a phonetic interpretation or to attempt a transliteration? Whose advice can you trust and how much will it cost?
· What are the implications for domain name searching & watching? Once IDN.IDNs are launched will registry operators change all parts of a whois record to a local script? Here is an example of a whois record for the domain name “Domainname.cn” as presented by one of the standard whois look-up tools which simply converts Chinese characters into meaningless ASCII:

Domain Name: domainname.cn
ROID: 20030311s10001s00027607-cn
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited
Registrant Organization: 淮北市大禹防水工程有限公司
Registrant Name: é¢œå¿ æ–¼
Administrative Email: 3429 @ 163.com
Sponsoring Registrar: 厦门三五互联科技股份有限公司
Name Server:ns1.dns-diy.com
Name Server:ns2.dns-diy.com
Registration Date: 2003-03-17 12:20
Expiration Date: 2010-03-17 12:48

Now compare this to the whois from CNNIC for the same term –which contains Chinese characters and is therefore hard for some of us to understand:


Domain Name domainname.cn
Domain Status clientTransferProhibited
Registrant Name 颜忠於
Administrative Email 3429 @ 163.com
Registrar 厦门三五互联科技股份有限公司
Name Server ns1.dns-diy.com
Name Server ns2.dns-diy.com
Creation Date 2003-03-17 12:20
Expiration Date 2010-03-17 12:48

We put the domain name of the registrant (颜忠於) into a translator to see if it would help us to identify the registrant. It translated the script as ‘The face is loyal’!