Recently in Internationalised Domain Names Category

Internationalized Domain Names under .TEL

Starting on June 15, you will be able to register .TEL domains in the following languages:

Chinese, Danish, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish

.TEL is the domain for all contact information under your name. It's perfect for both individuals and small businesses to quickly set up a simple website without the need to buy any additional web hosting.

.CO - the Colombian country code extension

The top-level domain (TLD) of Colombia is opening up to anyone worldwide on July 20, 2010. While the registry .CO Internet is marketing the TLD as a domain extension for general use, you should be aware that it is in fact a country code suffix.

More information on pricing at iWantMyName will be available shortly.

CNN Live News interview with Tina Dam from ICANN on topic of new Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) suffixes. The new development results in domain extensions such as .CN (China) or .GR (Greece) being available for users, expressed in their native languages and scripts.

The following internationalized country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) have already been approved by ICANN:

• United Arab Emirates (ae): .امارات
• China (cn): .中國 (traditional); .中国 (simplified)
• Egypt (eg): .مصر
• Hong Kong (hk): .香港
• Jordan (.jo): .الاردن
• Sri Lanka (lk): .ලංකා (Sinhalese); .இலங்கை (Tamil)
• Palestinian Territory (ps): .فلسطين
• Qatar (qa): .قطر
• Russian Federation (ru): .рф
• Saudi Arabia (sa): .السعودية
• Taiwan (tw): .台湾 (simplified); .台灣 (traditional)
• Thailand (th): .ไทย
• Tunisia (tn): .تونس

Source: Global by Design

The Lithuanian country domain .LT is the latest addition to the growing list of international domains offered at iWantMyName. Lithuania is a member state of the European Union and situated in Northern Europe. Domain names from Lithuania can be registered worldwide without any restrictions or local requirements.

.LT also supports Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) with the special Lithuanian characters (ą, č, ę, ė, į, š, ų, ū, ž). There are currently 111,767 registered domains in total (Statistics).

Search for your desired domain name now.

As of February 1, 2010, it will be possible to register the Luxembourgish .LU domain name extension without a local address in Luxembourg. This means that anyone worldwide can register .LU domains for personal or business use.

This new rule allows us to reduce the price for our valued customers. All new domain registrations and renewals will be reduced from $59.00 to $49.00 USD.

The .LU registry also announced the introduction of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) starting in April. More details on this coming soon.

As you may have heard, China recently changed the rules for .CN domain registrations blocking overseas registrars, excluding individuals from registering a domain name and requiring extensive documentation from businesses before domains are accepted. Thus, we have removed the .CN domain extension from our website completely until further notice.

If you would like to secure your online identity in China, we recommend registering a .COM / .NET Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) or soon to be available .ORG IDNs with Chinese characters instead. The registry for .ORG, PIR, is allowing IDNs with the Chinese and Traditional Chinese character sets from January 23rd 2010, 19:00 UTC. Please note that .ORG Chinese IDNs registered in the first 30 days, will have restriction placed upon them by the registry to allow for intellectual property interests to file UDRP actions if warranted. You will not be able to delete, transfer or update a domain during this time.

Chinese character .ORG domains can be registered through our standard domain search which is already fully IDN enabled.

中文国际域名 (IDNs) .ORG 很快开放

中国当局最近更改了.CN 域名注册规则。由于这些变更我们不得不暂时将 .CN 域名从我们的网站上移除。但是，如果阁下希望确保您在中国的在线身份，我们建议阁下用中文汉字注册 .COM / .NET 域名。同时 .ORG 域名也将作为国际域名 (IDN) 很快开放。敦请阁下注意，中文 IDNs 的 .ORG 域名自注册之日起30天内会受到限制。期间您将无法删除，传输或者上传。中文汉字域名 .ORG 可以通过我们的带有完整 IDN 功能的标准域名搜索来注册。例如 阳光.org

What better way to begin the new year 2010 than by receiving notice about price reductions from several registries? And since we always strive to pass on better prices to our customers, we are happy to announce the following new prices for the Russian, Polish and Czech domain extensions:

• .CZ Domain Names: $59.00 --> $39.00 USD
• .RU Domain Names: $49.00 --> $39.00 USD
• .PL Domain Names: $79.00 --> $39.00 USD

The Eastern European country code top-level domains are growing fast and can be found amongst the top 25 most popular domain extensions worldwide with .CZ (Czech Republic) having 591,000, .PL (Poland) 1.53 million and .RU (Russia) 2.31 million registered addresses in total. At iWantMyName we are fully enabled to search and register Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) which are now possible for both Cyrillic characters under .RU and the Polish alphabet letters within the .PL namespace.

ICANN, the internet's governing body, yesterday officially announced the introduction of Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) extensions for nations and territories. This means that a full web address including the domain suffix can contain non-Latin characters such as Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew or Greek in the future.

"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. But the Fast Track Process is the first step in bringing the 100,000 characters of the languages of the world online for domain names."

Watch the video with people from around the world explaining how localized domain names will help them using the internet in their native language:

The introduction of internationalized country domains is an important step towards a global internet and we would like to congratulate ICANN and everybody involved in achieving this long-awaited milestone.

At iWantMyName we strongly believe in an open and inclusive internet for all people on this planet. Hence we are always happy to support new technical developments that move us towards a truly internationlized web. We are making a special effort to roll out new services that enable multi-lingual functionality across the global web infrastructure, as these services become available.

Although it may still take a while until we will see localized versions of the .COM, .NET or .ORG suffixes, ICANN is making steady progress in pursuing changes to introduce internationalized country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) such as .РФ (.RF - Russian Federation) or .бг (.bg - Bulgaria) with a possible start date as early as 2010.

.NAME introduces IDN registration

As a further step to tear down language barriers on the web VeriSign, the domain registry for .NAME, enables the registration of internationalized web addresses with non-latin characters beneath this domain extension. From Nov 7th, you will be able to search and register domains in the same language scripts (e.g. Arabic, Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese or Japanese) as it is already possible for .COM and .NET web addresses.

IDN resources & domain tools:

• Online IDN Keyboard for other languages
• FlipMyName - create mirrored domain names

Get your own name domain in your local language as soon as they become available.

Now you can not only publish status updates for Twitter or Facebook in a cool way but also register very unique domain names. So why not astonish your friends with an upside down domain of your first name? Our fun domain name generator FlipMyName makes this possible. Just enter your name and you'll be presented with a flipped version.

Available first names under .COM

• Tim - ʇıɯ.com
• James - ɾɐɯǝs.com
• Mark - ʞɹɐɯ.com
• John - uɥoɾ.com

It's fun for sharing links on Twitter, Facebook or in your email and forum footer. You could also create your own URL shortener with it. The technology behind this is around for years by the way. Domains are registered as IDNs (Internationalised Domain Names) and are accessible by any modern browser.

We have received a lot of positive feedback in the local community about our recent announcement for Internationalised Domain Names with Māori macrons. A question we were asked quite often was how you can actually enter special characters on an English keyboard layout. While most operating systems have character tables to help you entering letters of foreign alphabets, we now have an easier alternative for you online.

The Virtual Keyboard allows you to choose from different non-English keyboard layouts. You just need to change the respective language and can start typing in Chinese, Japanese, Greek or Hebrew. Unfortunately it doesn't support one of our favourite languages but Klingon still hasn't made it into the official UTF-8 standard... ;)

Here's an example using Russian:

IDN Punycode Converter

Another little domain tool for IDNs is our IDN Punycode converter. All Internationalised Domain Names are converted into ASCII characters using Punycode to make them readable in the Domain Name System (DNS). So instead of the domain müller.com, computers actually read xn--mller-kva.com. The tool might be helpful to find out the ASCII syntax of an IDN. Check out the IDN Punycode converter here.