After a brief overview of the history of domain names, both at a technical level and at the level of administration entities, we are going to see in this post how we are moving from an English-speaking Internet to an Internet open to other alphabets and syllabaries.
The French AFNIC (for Association Française pour le Nommage Internet en Coopération), manages the .fr (France) extension, but also .pm (Saint Pierre and Miquelon), .re (Réunion), .tf (French Southern and Antarctic Lands), .wf (Wallis and Futuna), .yt (Mayotte), but only supports the thirty following characters: à, á, â, ã, ä, å, æ, ç, è, é, ê, ë, ì, í, î, ï, ñ, ò, ó, ô, õ, ö, œ, ß, ù, ú, û, ü, ý, and ÿ.
As the sunrise period ended on July 3, 2012, it is now possible for everyone to submit domain names with these characters (source, in French).
Technically, these domain names are translated into Punycode (or ACE, for ASCII-Compatible Encoding), a coding syntax used to represent unequivocally (i.e. in a complete, unique, and reversible way) a string encoded in Unicode to ASCII. Thus, the DNS tables can continue to operate in ASCII without any major changes.
For example, the domain name étals.fr will be rewritten xn--tals-9oa.fr, where xn-- is a prefix indicating an international name, http://عربي.امارات will become http://xn--ngbrx4e.xn--mgbaam7a8h, and http://www.ᏣᎳᎩ.net (written in Cherokee syllabary) will be transformed into http://xn--f9dt7l.net/.
In this case, the plaintiff, the company Goéland Distribution that sells T-shirts online, discovered that the domain name goéland.fr has been filed, without any site linked to it. The applicant argued that he was planning to launch a social network in 2013. The AFNIC dismissed the plaintiff on August, 28 2012 as “the documents provided by the parties could not conclude that the owner had registered the domain name in order to take advantage of the reputation of the applicant by creating a risk of confusion in the consumer's mind”. Besides, the plaintiff brand, GOELAND, although registered at the INPI (Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle, or National Industrial Property Institute) in 2007, does not contain any accent, which has not been in its favor. Nonetheless, we can ask questions about the good faith of the defender who, having filed quite a borderline domain name, was nevertheless “willing to find an amicable agreement”. Too bad for Goéland Distribution who missed its accentuated domain name. Perhaps the check asked for behind the scenes was too high? But these are only conjectures. For more on this case, see its case report (pdf, in French).
In another more recent decision from September 10, the squatter did not even bother to set any project, and merely redirected his domain name décorial.fr to a parking page and “did not answer the AFNIC”. The trademark Décorial was, however, dismissed, the College having decided to deny them the domain name transmission.
What to do when this happens? The AFNIC has developed an online service to resolve domain name disputes: Syreli. But in light of these two recent judgments, playing on accents still has good days ahead.
Thus, these countries have doubled (even tripled in the case of China and Taiwan) their possible number of national domain names. In practice, however, the registrars often offer a formula that includes the different alphabets at the same time.
Internationalization of domain names
Since December, 10 2009, it is possible to register domain names containing non-ASCII characters. This support depends on both domain names registrars and allowed characters. Most of them follow a two-step process, sometimes a three-step proccess. During the first stage, named the sunrise period, only the trademarks can apply for a domain matching their name with ASCII characters. It can be followed by a landrush period during which an entity can order generic terms for which it does not own a trademark. The last stage, the general availability period, enables any entity to buy a domain name on a first-come first-served basis.The French AFNIC (for Association Française pour le Nommage Internet en Coopération), manages the .fr (France) extension, but also .pm (Saint Pierre and Miquelon), .re (Réunion), .tf (French Southern and Antarctic Lands), .wf (Wallis and Futuna), .yt (Mayotte), but only supports the thirty following characters: à, á, â, ã, ä, å, æ, ç, è, é, ê, ë, ì, í, î, ï, ñ, ò, ó, ô, õ, ö, œ, ß, ù, ú, û, ü, ý, and ÿ.
As the sunrise period ended on July 3, 2012, it is now possible for everyone to submit domain names with these characters (source, in French).
Technically, these domain names are translated into Punycode (or ACE, for ASCII-Compatible Encoding), a coding syntax used to represent unequivocally (i.e. in a complete, unique, and reversible way) a string encoded in Unicode to ASCII. Thus, the DNS tables can continue to operate in ASCII without any major changes.
For example, the domain name étals.fr will be rewritten xn--tals-9oa.fr, where xn-- is a prefix indicating an international name, http://عربي.امارات will become http://xn--ngbrx4e.xn--mgbaam7a8h, and http://www.ᏣᎳᎩ.net (written in Cherokee syllabary) will be transformed into http://xn--f9dt7l.net/.
Cybersquatters on the lookout
The French case
Very few brands were concerned about this development. Nevertheless, as soon as a letter in the name of a domain can be replaced by any of its accentuated version, that domain can be potentially squatted. Should you need to buy each and every possible combination then? A priori, justice should protect your brand as soon as you notify it. However, there already have been several precedents in France, starting with the case goeland.fr against goéland.fr.In this case, the plaintiff, the company Goéland Distribution that sells T-shirts online, discovered that the domain name goéland.fr has been filed, without any site linked to it. The applicant argued that he was planning to launch a social network in 2013. The AFNIC dismissed the plaintiff on August, 28 2012 as “the documents provided by the parties could not conclude that the owner had registered the domain name in order to take advantage of the reputation of the applicant by creating a risk of confusion in the consumer's mind”. Besides, the plaintiff brand, GOELAND, although registered at the INPI (Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle, or National Industrial Property Institute) in 2007, does not contain any accent, which has not been in its favor. Nonetheless, we can ask questions about the good faith of the defender who, having filed quite a borderline domain name, was nevertheless “willing to find an amicable agreement”. Too bad for Goéland Distribution who missed its accentuated domain name. Perhaps the check asked for behind the scenes was too high? But these are only conjectures. For more on this case, see its case report (pdf, in French).
In another more recent decision from September 10, the squatter did not even bother to set any project, and merely redirected his domain name décorial.fr to a parking page and “did not answer the AFNIC”. The trademark Décorial was, however, dismissed, the College having decided to deny them the domain name transmission.
What to do when this happens? The AFNIC has developed an online service to resolve domain name disputes: Syreli. But in light of these two recent judgments, playing on accents still has good days ahead.
The Canadian case
On its side, the CIRA (Canadian Internet Registration Autority) multiplies its IDN consultations and explicits the engaged process to better manage its launch in January 2013.The Brazilian case (.br)
The Internationalized Domain Names are supported since May 2005 for the .br extension, exclusively for the Portuguese language characters (which are à, á, â, ã, é, ê, í, ó, ô, õ, ú, ü, and ç), but potential conflicts about accentuated versions were killed in the egg: a domain with accents and/or cedillas can only be filed by the same entity owner of the equivalent name with no accent and/or cedilla (source, in Portuguese).The Portuguese case (.pt)
In Portugal, the same Portuguese accentuated characters are allowed since January, 1 2005. This is the Arbitrare center (arbitration center for industrial property, domain names, businesses names and denominations) that handles potential conflicts through an online application (in Portuguese).The Spanish case (.es)
Domain names in .es can support Castilian, Catalan, Basque and Galician characters since October, 30 2007: á, à, ç, é, è, í, ï, l·l (Catalan geminated l), ñ, ó, ò, ú, and ü. Disputes are directly settled at the Administrative Court (Domain names processing procedures, pdf in Spanish).Internationalization of domain name extensions
The same technique is applied to the domain names extensions, operational since May 2010, which allows the extension itself to support other character sets than latin-1. Egypt (مصر.), Saudi Arabia (لسعودية.), United Arab Emirates (امارات.), then Russia (.рф), China (.中國 and .中国), Taiwan (.台灣 and .台湾), Hong Kong (.香港) and Kazakhstan (.қаз) are already equipped, and many others follow.Thus, these countries have doubled (even tripled in the case of China and Taiwan) their possible number of national domain names. In practice, however, the registrars often offer a formula that includes the different alphabets at the same time.
A first step
This internationalization of domain names and their extension will help increase the number of possible domains, even if for the moment they are mostly duplicates of existing ones. We will see in a future post that this is only a first step of a much wider process.Illustration: Chris Harrison.
Noms de domaines : on internationalise (in French)
Nombres de dominios: se internacionalizan (in Spanish)
Nomes de domínio: internacionalizam-se (in Portuguese)
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