On May 25th 1961 before a joint session of Congress, President John F. Kennedy gave a speech expressing his goal of reaching the moon by the end of the 1960’s.

“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth”

As history records, that goal was realised
8 years later when on July 20th 1969, Neil Armstrong of the Apollo 11 mission became the first man on the moon.

What a great day for America, and a great day for all mankind – it’s amazing what you can achieve in 8 years.

On November 9th 2000 ICANN began to implement IDN’s. Phase one on Nov 9th saw what was reported to be a registration frenzy over the next 30 days, with over 1 million Japanese, Chinese & Korean dot com’s registered.

And over the next few months, saw hundreds more languages added.

But there was a problem, in fact a few:

a) they wouldn’t resolve in the current browser of the day (IE5)
b) they were only half an IDN (to type the dot com part, native users would have to toggle language to English)
c) you couldn’t use an IDN as an email address in the popular email clients

In the previous Chapter I laid out the need and the opportunity for IDN’s, but we had one outstanding question relating to why hasn’t it happened already, to elaborate:

— why hasn’t the traffic arrived
— why the slow adoptance by end users
— why is IDN confined to a niche area of domaining
— why have IDN-ers been boring the tits off everyone for what seems like forever with prophecies of “the next big thing”

In November 2000 and early 2001 there certainly was a lot of interest – and if you look at what was going on at the time:

— ICANN were busy working on the next part of the rollout (b) and (c) above

— Verisign had released a downloadable plug-in to allow IE5 to resolve IDN’s, but knowing it was a short-term crappy idea were surely working closely with ICANN on (b) above

— Microsoft, having launched IE4 in 1997, IE5 in 1999 and with IE6 ready to launch in August 2001…

.. things were looking peachy.

Microsoft

But it didn’t quite come together. IE6 did launch in August 2001 (a full year after ICANN introduced IDN) – but much to the disappointment of IDN registrants, just like its predecessors, there was no IDN support.

I wasn’t domaining in 2001, but I can imagine that IDN registrants must have been sick to the stomach… it would stand to reason that people would start bailing out and dropping these domains.

The ones that held out knowing the release pattern of IE1-IE6 from past (1995, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2001) – no doubt were counting on something turning up in IE7 over the next 1-2 years.

Add to this the dot com bust of the time and nothing from Microsoft in the following 2 years; and I can see how IDN would start to fall off the radar and drop like flies.

It was a full 5 years later until an IDN enabled browser would see the light of day from Microsoft, in the form of IE7.

Shame on you Microsoft.

ICANN

So how has this not for profit organisation been getting on with IDN-ing the extension; (the dot com part) and establishing guidelines for IDN email – It’s been, what, 8 years now?

Shame on you ICANN, maybe NASA can give you some pointers on how to actually deliver something.

At this point i’d just like to say, if you are reading this and you were one of the testbed registrants and still have IDN’s dating back to these first days – knowing that year after year your renewal fee was simply funding the fat cats at ICANN to collect passport stamps by eating luxury lunches in exotic locations around the world – while somehow delivering nothing and answering to no one – kudos to you for holding out.

Verisign

I’m not sure how innocent Verisign are in all this over the last 8 years – maybe their hands were tied by ICANN, who knows.

But I think you’ll agree, whichever way you look at it, it’s a pretty pathetic state of affairs.

back to the Land Rush

In the previous chapter, I spoke about a land rush I walked into in early 2006. As I would later piece together the puzzle, it became clear to me why this land rush was happening.

Microsoft had announced IE7 was due out (and that it was IDN enabled), and ICANN seemed to have awoken from their comatose state and were busying themselves with talk of imminently adding IDN extensions in the root.

But before you go chalking up a kudos point to ICANN for getting back with the programme; despite rumours that they voted one day to actually do something… nope – it was this rumor in March 2006 that began circling the web – that China, so pissed off waiting for ICANN to wake up, had “split the root” and added IDN Chinese symbol extensions of their own, and not just any old extensions, but .com and .net transliterations..

Talk about giving ICANN the virtual finger.

If you then couple these events with the fact that during the previous years, a lot of IDN’s dropped as registrants realised they had been abandoned, it makes sense why there was renewed interest in 2006.

So what does the future look like?

In order for IDN to be a success, there’s only really 3 pre-requisites:

1. Awareness

I don’t know whether ICANN are embarrassed of their shabby 8 year track record to-date, but they publicly talk like IDN’s don’t exist yet and haven’t for the last 8 years. In their press releases, they talk about soon finally allowing users to navigate the web in their own language.
The tech press and the mainstream press take this as read, and so also report that IDN will be here soon (aka doesn’t exist today).
It’s a fair assumption to make, that the vast majority of end users and businesses, and advertising agencies etc think the same.

But this will soon change, ICANN have an awareness/communication budget to spread the word that IDN is alive (and no doubt to prove they can deliver something)
Add to this the local communication via the country codes that are involved in the IDN fast-track process…

… and it’s safe to assume, that the IDN mindset will be repositioned from “does not exist”, to “very much exists”.

2. IDNing the extension

The Verisign play
I will talk about this in more detail next time, but in a recent letter to ICANN – Verisign, represented along side Yahoo, EBay, Oracle, TW/AOL and NewsCorp as “The Netchoice Coalition” wrote:

We believe that the billions of people who don’t use the Latin alphabet deserve to have access to IDN versions of common existing gTLDs — not just IDN versions of their ccTLD.

So it is 100% clear that Verisign will be making a play to secure IDN versions of “com”, “net” etc as part of the IDN gTLD process pencilled in to complete 2009/2010.

Happy days for IDN.com holders.

But will ICANN actually deliver this time, or are we in for another 8 year wait?

At the recent ICANN Mexico gathering in March of this year, ICANN’s CEO Paul Twomey announced he was not renewing his contract and effectively resigning his post. He stated that his term ends on 30th June, but crucially he will stay on until the end of 2009 to finish the IDN gTLD & ccTLD implementation. [>> 02.30s]

So the race is on – if I were Paul Twomey, I would want to make damn sure I finished this project before moving on; because no amount of creative wizardry to his resume, would mask this debacle.

3. IDN enabled browser penetration

With Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari already being IDN enabled for some time, it’s really just the dominant browser now that needs to reach penetration. IE7 now 3 years old and shipping as standard with Vista; and an IE8 out in beta already – this pre-requisite is almost fulfilled (in most countries).
Link

So Domainers are private people

I count myself lucky that a lot of IDN-ers freely share information with me about unreported sales and traffic and revenue stats – but confiding in me, and going public are 2 very different beasts.

To keep things simple, I won’t be posting up any stats that I can’t verify myself, and that I don’t have the permission of parties involved – so throughout these blog posts, I will try to convince more of those domainers out there to go public with me and share some of the juicy stats, that so far is kept under wraps.

There are very few developed IDN’s out there today, but perhaps the following courtesy of Lee is a glimpse into the future of developed IDN traffic levels.

You have to admit, bearing in mind what I have been saying about the total lack of awareness and publicity, and that afterall it’s only half an IDN – that’s pretty good traffic levels for today.
The domain is เกมส์.com, Game(s).com in Thai – a developed Game portal.
On a side note – you got to love the buy-one-get-one-free with Asian domains. There is no plural or singular… Game/Games it’s the same word, same domain.

The traffic is all organic, and legit i.e. not being routed from other sources.
The site is under going a revamp, so we will be sure to revisit it with a special dedicated posting when it re-launches in the next couple of months.

Next up: We take a trip to Russia for a deep-dive into Cyrillic language domains; the buzz they are creating locally and get down and dirty comparing ccTLD vs gTLD.

We’ll also explore the Russian traffic phenomenon that a lot of IDNers have reported – and I’ll have another screenshot exposé of some astonishing traffic, this time for a Russian domain.