Internationalized Domain Names

ICANN just announced a big step in their ongoing IDN efforts, with plans to enable the registration and use of Internet domain names based on non-Latin alphabets and characters.    A complex undertaking, more than half of the world’s 1.6 Billion Internet users native languages use non-Latin alphabets, characters or symbols, including  Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Cyrillic.  Interesting to see how Brand Managers as well as Domainers react to this coming Continental shift in web addressing.  Expect a race to register thousands of “premium” domain names,  for example the Perso-Arabic script equivalent of  www.farsi.com which sold for over $70,000 in August 2009.