Stéphane Van Gelder, a member of ICANN's Nominating Committee and strategy director for NetNames, looks into whether internationalized domain names really are useful in a current blog post at domainincite.com.
Russia's .РФ is one of the most prominent IDNs so far, according to Van Gelder. "The Russian registry saw stunning initial take-up when it opened the IDN .РФ to general consumption on November 11, 2010. Registration volumes were explosive, with almost 600,000 names registered in the first month", Van Gelder writes. The TLD sports 845,037 names, with a commendable 70% delegation rate that has not stopped rising since .РФ opened in 2010 with a 45% delegation rate.
"The Cyrillic Russian domain sees a vast predominance of personal use, with 77% percent of domains being registered by individuals", Van Gelder notes further, citing one of the Internet experts: “Russians care deeply about their national identity, and to them, Dot RF is a matter of national pride”.
IDNs may not really be all that different from ASCII domain names, with take-up depending on perceived use or value, and Europe’s IDN experience seems to confirm this, Van Gelder points out. As revealed by European registry EURid’s Giovanni Seppia, since EURid introduced IDNs on December 11, 2009, registrations reached a peak of around 70,000 before dropping off quite sharply. Overall, there are 3.7 million names currently registered in the .eu space.
The reason for this, according to Stéphane Van Gelder, is that ".eu IDNs may not hold much potential for real use or investment value for Europeans".
Van Gelder also points out that while web use is possible with IDNs, software primarily designed for an ASCII-only world does not always make it easy. "Email capability would be a real boost, but so far only the Chinese seem to have enabled it for their local script domains. The Chinese registry recently announced this, without giving details on how the use of all-Chinese character email addresses has been implemented or which email clients support IDNs.", Van Gelder says. Russia's largest email provider, Mail.Ru, has also enabled similar capabilities for emails in .РФ.
Van Gelder has served as chair of the GNSO Council and is currently a member of ICANN’s Nominating Committee.
