In the near future (on the 10th of December to be exact) it’s going to be possible to use international characters in .EU domain names. Some of the soon to be allowed characters are Swedish å and German ü.
The trend is that more and more Top Level Domains (TLDs) are allowing international characters in their domain names and it’s a little bit surprising that .EU waited this long. In Europe the majority of countries have special characters in their alphabets so it’s kind of important for creating cool and nice sounding trademarks. .COM was pretty early on this area.
The full list of characters that will be allowed from December this year can be found here.
.EU has about 3 million domain names registered (according to their own web site) and a big portion of these would need to register the domain names once again with the international characters instead of using just a Latin character. For example in Sweden you’ve been allowed to register Swedish characters in domain names for a long time, but before that was possible many web site owners registered domain names with just “a” instead of using the Swedish character “å”. When “å” suddenly became possible to register in domain names web site owners had to register another domain name with the correct letter to protect it from cyber squatters. One example is Åmål (a Swedish city) that used to have just amal.se as domain name, but had to register the correct one too (åmål.se) to protect it from squatters. Another example is the Swedish social security insurance (Försäkringskassan) that had to register several domain names and even thou became victims for cyber squatters! The more “dots” above the characters the more problems tend to be the general trend in these cases.
Also international users not from your country would get into problems with this kind of domain names. Do you think an American would know how to type åmål.se on his keyboard? Or maybe someone from Spain trying to type a Greek domain name? In those cases you would need to setup two types of sites , one for international users with just the Latin characters and another one for your local users.
It’s not a big deal for most companies to register “just” one or two more domain names, but lets pretend about 1/3 of all registered .EU domain names would have to register at least one more domain name just to protect their site. That’s another million of domain names that people just have to register for protection!!!
Is it really needed with international characters in domain names or is it just another way for registrars to earn some extra money from hard working web site owners that just need to protect their names one more time…. I’m guessing that the later is one of the more important things for registrars when they implement IDN (Internationalized Domain Names).
According to me IDN is just a waste of time and money for most Internet users and the world could easily survive without it, but still you need to have a look at the .EU domains in your portfolio to make sure squatters can’t make any problems for you.
