What if the ICANN Seoul conference wasn’t scheduled at the same exact time as the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conference? What if it wasn’t scheduled in a remote place such as Seoul? If instead the ICANN conference was conveniently located in New York without a major domain event conflict, perhaps many more domainers would show up and pressure [...]
Today the Wall Street Journal realized that one of the biggest changes to the internet since its inception will be happening soon. (See link). The WSJ quoted Rod Beckstrom as saying the following: “The statistics show that over half of the users of the Internet today don’t use the Roman alphabet in their first language,” [...]
Hangul or 조선글 is the native alphabet of the Korean language. Since 2006, when the Korean government issued a White Paper (see link) supportive of IDNs, both the government and natives craved .IDN TLDs in their native tongue. Currently, the .kr ccTLD is a popular substitute given that widespread nationalism leads to a weakened Korean IDN.com market. Kyunghyang.com, a major online [...]
Steve DelBianco, chairman of the Net Choice Coalition, which represents companies like VeriSign, recently lamented that “under ICANN’s ‘fast-track’ process, the IDN country-code domains go live first, while IDN versions of global domains like .com and .org will languish in [the] bureaucratic process for at least another year.” Steve strongly argued in his article (see [...]
The following are the 12 respondents who applied for the task of evaluating applicants for the new gTLDs: Organization/Location 1. Deloitte & Laga/Belgium 2. Economist Intelligence Unit/United States 3. Ernst & Young/United States 4. Fulcrum Financial Inquiry/United States 5. GeoLang LTD/United Kingdom 6. InterConnect Communications/United Kingdom 7. Iranian ICT Guild Organization (IranNSR)/Iran 8. JAS Communications/United [...]
Today, Russian Internet Week opened in the Exhibition Center of Moscow. Starring is the first Cyrillic extension .РФ, which stands for .RF or Russian Federation. Russia is a country of intense nationalism, where .ru is the current TLD leader in domain registrations rather than .com. Russian language nationalism is so rampant that in August 2008, [...]
Got milk ads can be funny, especially in Spanish. Latinos couldn’t stop laughing when the ads came on where “Got Milk” was translated as “are you lactating?” (¿Tiene leche?) The humor was unintentional. And the Milk Board has smartened up since the unfortunate “¿Tiene leche?” campaign was released years ago. The moral of the story, [...]
Arabic domainers are excited about the newly announced .IDN extension, which is .امارات (.emarat). The release is planned for the second quarter of 2010. The UAE’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority will be managing this release. The director general of the TRA urged the use of this .IDN as he appealed to Arabic users’ nationalism, “We encourage [...]
(Image courtesy of the Phoenician and Flickr) Goal setting involves a combination of predicting the future and creating it. Where will I be, and where will the world be in 5 years, if all continues along the same trajectory? Given the predicted result, what changes should I make in the here and now? All signs [...]
Overseas, natives search and type-in domains using their native languages. So if you are to explore the rich world of IDNs, should you register a dot com or a ccTLD? I believe that to hedge your bets, you should register both. But if you would like to restrict your focus to one or the other, [...]
