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.

Check this one out..

Quote: … IDN’s, yeh I heard about them – I’m not into IDN’s, I prefer .com’s instead.

I remember reading that comment and others like it in various guises over the last few years



For the record, here is an example of an IDN: бизнес.com

The part to the left of the dot is the internationalized part “бизнес” (it means “Business” by the way in Russian) and also exists in .net etc too.

So to be crystal clear, IDN’s can be .com, .net, .tv and so on.. if you’re reading this thinking, omg he’s teaching me to suck eggs, that was my initial thought and almost why I didn’t post this. But I’ve seen that quote so many times, and it is so far from the truth.

Other sources of my motivation…
check out these two dropping domains from 4th May:

casino♠.com
poker♣.com

Technically speaking, the 2 names above are IDN’s, but only because they contain a symbol.
What was the registrant thinking? The “♠” and “♣” symbols don’t appear on any keyboard anywhere. So you could never type it.

Maybe the registrant was thinking there might be an SEO exploit using them. I’m no SEO expert, but I see tons of these “experiments” drop every day.
(ICANN have also made moves to invalidate such symbols and characters – I’ll cover this another day)

In my book, unless someone can type it on a keyboard, it aint no domain. It’s just 8 bucks burnt.

another misconception:

“Oui” is the French word for “Yes”.
So, is Oui.com an IDN?

Nope. Just because it is a non-English word, doesn’t mean it’s an IDN

Look at these two dropping domains also from 4th May:

trícks.com
dríll.com

When I see domains like this, my first thought is “scammer”; my second is “stupid”.
See the little í mark over the third letter? Right.. so now we know it’s not “tricks” or “drill”
So maybe they mean “tricks” and “drill” in another language.

A quick Google search making sure you enclose the term in quotes*…

…brings up less than 200 results. Compared with the results for “tricks” – millions of results.
I think it’s safe to say, “trícks” is not a word in any language. Besides, even if it was, with less than 200 Google results.. yep it’s junk.

* Searching with quotes here is the key. Google does some funky things if you search without them, in fact it’s very misleading as you’ll be returned millions of results.

I see tons of names like this drop each and every day, including numerous variations of “sex”, with different accents and marks over the “e”. What was the registrant thinking? I can only assume their motivation was to deceive.

But there is a bigger problem than just some clueless guy burning another 8 bucks:

LINK

Some unlucky guy bid 700 EUR for this… but it’s no Pizza. It might look like Pizza, but it won’t taste like Pizza when he get’s it home.

Copying the domain from Sedo and pasting it into Google would instantly tell you something is dodgy here.

So in summary;

an IDN is a domain that consists of characters other than just a-z and 0-9, and can be typed in on a keyboard – it can be .com, .net, .tv..

Sadly the example above of fakey domains at Sedo is not an isolated incident, but that is the tip of the iceberg as far as what’s wrong with Sedo.

In today’s economy it is inexcusable to leave money on the table, but that is what Sedo is doing every single day; what’s worse is that Sedo know all this as confirmed by recent dialogue with them – there is so much wrong at Sedo it deserves a dedicated posting.

Until then.. rest assured Sedo, I’m coming for you

Like

Unlike