ICANN opens top-level domain names to non Latin scripts
At a recent meeting in Seoul, Korea, the Board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved the Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) Country Code Top-Level Domain Names (ccTLDs) Fast Track Process. In addition to the Latin alphabet country codes currently in use, ccTLDs composed of nearly every known script will soon be available.
Historically, domain names on the internet have been restricted to a limited set of characters: 26 Latin letters, the numerals 0 to 9, and a hyphen. Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) are domain names represented by local language characters. IDNs could contain letters or characters from alphabets, such as Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese, Cyrillic, Arabic, and other languages using non-Latin alphabets and non-Roman characters. Because ICANN has long permitted use of non-Roman scripts in the portion of the domain name preceding the "dot," it will soon be possible to register Web site addresses written entirely in a script other than Roman and a language other than English.
The IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process will launch on 16 November 2009. Countries and territories will be able to request their country name in the script of their choice as a top-level domain name. Approval of these requests is expected to take several months, and it is hoped that the new ccTLDs will be available to internet users in early to mid-2010. Countries and territories that use languages based on scripts other than Roman will then be able to offer their internet users domain names entirely in non-Roman characters.
How does this development affect your business? If you do business in areas around the world where the predominant alphabet is something other than the Latin alphabet, you should consider developing transliterations of your trademarks and service marks from the Latin alphabet into the alphabet of those countries. In addition, be ready to register those transliterations as domain names when the time comes. If the transliterations are used in the packaging or marketing of your products or services, you should also consider registration of those transliterations as trademarks in order to fully protect your trademark rights in the countries where the transliterations are used.
