I won’t lie to you, this is a long-ass post – but it’s long for a reason, I wanted all the key info on one page – and if you make it through to the end, and you didn’t know much about IDN before now; or thought you did, but had only got your info before from listening to know-nothings – congratulations your perspective has probably just changed.

Continuing from here – my viewpoint in 2006

Foreigners

In February of 2006, I walked through the door at IDNforums. I strolled into what can only be best described as a frenzied gold rush.

I didn’t know what an IDN was, I just saw squiggly characters with a dot com on my screen. Yet all around me I could see people bidding up auctions and posting bragging comments about the hoards of squiggles they had just registered.

This intrigued me, and it wasn’t long before I realised that these were foreign languages of some sort, with a dot com slapped on the end.

My head filled with a bunch of childlike questions as I tried to connect the dots.

So do “foreigners” use the internet?
— I almost laughed at myself thinking this one – but realised at the same time, I hadn’t actually really ever given it a lot of thought

So do these “foreigners” all use “our” English websites like Ebay.com or are there websites out there in French etc?
— again, never thought about it before – no idea

So what about domain names with squiggles in?
— I didn’t know you could, I didn’t know you couldn’t. I simply hadn’t ever thought about it before.

It’s funny; I like ending the day knowing I learned something new each day, usually it’s something trivial – but today I felt like I was drinking from a fire hose.

I took a closer look at some of these posts – Overture for some of these squiggles was being quoted in the hundreds of thousands or millions for these fresh regged $7 domains. I had spent over a year mining for .co.uk terms and never found anything in excess of a few thousand Overture.

But what really grabbed my attention was that this wasn’t just a bunch of English speaking Americans/Brits – there were a good number of what were obviously “foreign” members who were bidding for and registering domains in their own language.

This was enough reason for me to warrant a closer look, but a cautious look – I was well versed in the tales of the elders who were in the 90’s gold rush; I know there are smarter guys out there than me with a decade of domaining experience – so how was it possible that this opportunity (if it was one) even existed ?

Partnerships

I spent the next 3 days reading and researching, and very quickly came to the conclusion that I needed to assess this quickly; and move quickly if my research gave this a green-light.

I knew I was a few months late to this party – people were already beginning to abandon their shovels in favor of heavy machinery.

If my background had taught me anything, it had taught me that I am stronger and more agile when part of a team.

I 100% advocate the power of Partnerships. I have had many over the years in the domain game, some one-time affairs, others short term, and some permanent still today.

Maximizing the strengths, resources and skill-sets of others often leaves both parties net better off (I’ll talk more about some of these specifically another day)

Falling back to my default state, I set about quickly documenting what I had seen, in to what I suppose you could call a loose business plan, and approached 2 close colleagues.
1 of these jumped at the chance, and we have been financial partners ever since – the other tells me regularly he might have made the wrong decision.

7 Simple Questions

So what did he buy into? From a 2006 viewpoint, I posed these questions and set out to find evidence to answer them.
(While my findings at the time were based on information available in 2006; for the purposes of this post, I have sometimes linked to more recent documents)

Q. IDN, junk or not?
Q. Do all internet users speak English?
Q. Is there non-English content out there?
Q. Do non-English users $pend online?

and the million $ questions:

Q. Do users search in their own language?
Q. What about the “dot com” part?
Q. So why hasn’t it happened already?

Q. IDN, junk or not?

A. This is a trick question, and I added it in because I see it regularly asked, just like that.
The answer is yes and no. If you are asking if “IDN” will add value to an end user, or if it is a good investment, then a similar analogy is like asking are “Cars” reliable?

To answer the question, you need to drop down a level and look at Countries and Languages. Some languages don’t need IDN as much as others; some countries barely use the internet. Some countries have huge populations compared to others, and then there’s GDP to consider etc. With IDN supported in approx 350 different languages, it’s important to focus your sights.

Q. Do all internet users speak English?

A. Short answer is No.
Longer answer is No as well, but nobody it seems can put an exact number on it.
What is clear is that there are much higher numbers of users who can read English, than can write or speak it.

The Link here, shows the number of English Speakers by Country. The data in places is fairly dated now, but the message is loud and clear. Besides, as you’ll read shortly, this isn’t the important question.

Q. Is there non-English content out there?

A. Yes.
Paul Twomey says it well here and highlights the trend:

Currently, only about 35 percent of all Internet users are native English speakers, although English websites continue to dominate, with approximately 68 percent of all sites readable only in English.

About two-thirds of English-language sites are devoted to e-commerce, and fully half of those still originate in North America. Once much higher, these numbers have gone through a natural realignment as Internet use continues to expand geographically.

Naturally, people are more comfortable reading the languages and writing the scripts they find most familiar. It follows that the promise of content on the Internet in a preferred language generates increased local interest and use.

Q. Do non-English users $pend online?

A. Yes
Nielsen link:

According to the latest Nielsen Global Online Survey on Internet Shopping Habits, almost 90 percent of the world’s online population has used the Internet to make a purchase.

If you think most of these online purchases come from the United States, you’re wrong.

The highest percentage of online shoppers is found in South Korea, where 99 percent of those
with Internet access have used it to shop, followed by the UK (97%), Germany (97%), Japan (97%), with the U.S. coming in at the eighth position –94%

Q. Do users search in their own language?

A. Oh Yeah
For me this was the money-shot.
Back in the day, one of the most useful little gems in the toolbox, was Googles Zeitgeist.

Not only did Google very kindly publish each week the most popular search queries internationally, it also proved to some what was obvious, to others less obvious – the acid test that non-English users in some countries search entirely in local language (each week)

Here’s a look back at a selection from September 2005 (link)

While the Ozzie’s were busy looking for the latest of what Paris Hilton was revealing, Google was revealing some interesting information about other Countries.

If you followed the link to the full report, you’ll have noticed that a lot of countries top results are English – you’ll also notice that certain countries have no English searches. (Feel free to correlate this back to the other chart of English speaking countries)

I Just noticed #11 on the China list, you’d think it would be easier to search for “WOW” instead of the Chinese symbols for “World of Warcraft” – I guess not if you’re Chinese.

Q. What about the “dot com” part?

A. Yes, an IDN today is only half an IDN. Until you “IDN” the extension too.

I will cover this need and how essential it really is, specifically, when I do a deeper-dive and focus on specific languages/countries – and while recently there has been a lot of activity
from ICANN on this front.. back in November of 2005 Verisign published their “dname white paper”. Link

In short: a technical solution to alias existing “.com” and “.net” domains to virtual gTLDs, so that both the IDN.com and full IDN.IDN resolve to the same place.

Conclusion

In 2006, all of this absolutely made sense to me, it also tied up with what “native” domainers were saying; and their registration activity that in itself spoke volumes.

But it’s important to do your own research, and that’s exactly what I did. I proved to me that the need for IDN does exist (in certain languages), and thus the opportunity exists too.

So what of this “opportunity”; what did my now-business partner think when confronted with all this?
It was something along the lines of… that while there is still the need for a few more planets to align – that this probably falls into that rare category of a once in a life time opportunity, that you cannot afford to ignore, else you face the risk of a life filled with “what if’s”.

Q. So why hasn’t it happened already?

Next up: To begin to answer this question, we first need to retrieve a few more missing puzzle pieces.

So buckle-up, as we dust off the Flux-Capacitor and briefly step back to where it all started…
… then back to recent events as we observe the aligning of more planets.

And finally – we pay a visit to Russia for the first of our country/language deep-dives, and also where this first suite of posts reaches it’s explosive climax.