IDN demystified

It’s hard not to notice the IDN sales keep creeping in at DNjournal each week, some of them reaching dizzy heights in the 6 figures.. but there’s a pattern, have you spotted it? – it’s usually a German language domain, and it’s almost always sold via Sedo.

So what does this tell us?

Well, it tells us that Sedo have a huge reach – that we knew.
It also re-confirms that Sedo dominates not just the ccTLD space, but also the non-English space too.

You also might think that these sales we keep seeing tells us that the only interest in IDN, are German IDNs.. but you’d be wrong, this is very misleading.

You see, Sedo have a little problem, a problem that they have been telling people publicly will be fixed for over 5 years now.

Before we get into that, let’s take a look at Sedo’s mission statement.

…Sedo has experienced remarkable success establishing a global domain name marketplace… to continue extending the reach of our services regardless of language or location…Sedo’s top priorities have always focused on research and development…Sedo is positioned to continue its growth as a complete domain service provider with an internationally recognised brand…

Not sure what your take away from all that was, but I read:

• Global marketplace
• Regardless of language
• Top Priority is R&D

So why is it that if I try and list a Chinese language domain for sale, I get this message:

Maybe I would have more luck with Russian..

.. nope.

Ok, so Sedo can’t handle them… not quite the leading edge R&D powerhouse then.

Let’s get a little closer to home.

Last week on DNjournal along with the usual appearance of a few German IDNs sold through Sedo, I also noticed a few Czech language IDNs too (zájezdy.eu, práce.eu and dovolená.eu)

Hurrah! So Sedo can also handle the Czech language…

erm, no.

I tried to add this domain in earlier: tři, it means “three” in Czech, and guess what..

So in summary, Sedo’s globalness reaches as far as Germany plus half of the Czech Republic.

As I mentioned earlier, Sedo have been aware of this problem for years.
For over 5 years, various Sedo reps have turned up and shown their face at IDNforums, and each time given a promise that their “technical limitations” would be resolved, but alas, nothing.

In fact I jested earlier about Sedos mission statement referring to their top focus being research and development, and it has got me thinking, usually when a database or interface can’t handle IDN characters, it’s because it is not UTF-8 encoded, but somehow Sedo have achieved the impossible here, by UTF-8 encoding their systems so they can handle German special characters (and half of the Czech special characters), but none of the other characters that UTF-8 encoding allows. Quite incredible.

Summary

Yes this post has been somewhat of a bitch-slap for Sedo, but that’s what you get when you repeatedly make & break promises for 5 years, but I would like to wrap this up with two simple open questions for Sedo.

1. Are Sedo making so much money, that they and their shareholders don’t need the extra revenue from enabling the other half of the Czech language, plus the hundreds of other languages that IDN affords ?

2. Are you finally able to commit with any confidence when you will fix this “bug” ?

A link to this blog post has been emailed to Tim Schumacher CEO at Sedo; the IDN community is patiently awaiting your feedback.

14 people like this post.

Unlike