Recently, Chuck Gomes of VeriSign was quoted as stating, “VeriSign will be submitting proposals for multiple IDN versions of .COM and .NET . . .” For the IDN investor who has bought IDN.com, this means that the value of your domains has just gone up significantly given that you will likely have an opportunity to [...]

The biggest domaining news in the last year broke today. The Generic Names Supporting Organization Council (GNSO), which deals with policy making on generic top-level domains (gTLDs) passed a motion to send the below letter to ICANN. Moreover, VeriSign stated in connection with the letter, “VeriSign will be submitting proposals for multiple IDN versions of [...]

секс.рф (Sex).рф and банк.рф (Bank).рф headlined a group of premium domain names that were awarded to a single Russian company. The release of the .рф (.rf) ccTLD should have merely been a time for celebration, but the event was marred by claims that cronyism turned the sunrise period for .рф into an uneven playing field. [...]

Today, the first three IDN.IDN ccTLDs were integrated into the root. The three new top-level domains are السعودية. (“.Al-Saudiah”, for Saudi Arabia), امارات. ( “.Emarat” for the UAE) and مصر. (“.Misr” for Egypt). Kim Davies, the Manager of Root Zone Services, wrote excitedly on the ICANN blog: “Today the first three production non-Latin top-level domains [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

                There are many influential domainers who are uneducated about IDNs and put them down.  Why?     1. Most influential domainers made their money by buying English .com’s and since that is what worked for them, they narrowly propose sticking to this tried and tested method.  Remember, [...]

Copernicus believed the opposite of the masses.  When it was supposedly common knowledge that the Earth was the center of the universe, Copernicus had the guts to say that it was the Sun, and he had the research to back it. If you missed out on the domain gold rush of the 1990s, don’t resign [...]