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International Domain Names (IDN)

  1. What is an IDN variant?
  2. Did the rules for COM / NET IDNs change?
  3. Why can't I register the € character in my IDN?
  4. What is punycode?
  5. Why was my international domain name (IDN) not registered?
  6. What is an International Domain Name (IDN)?

1. What is an IDN variant?

A variant is an alternative form of the domain name. The most common example is if you register a Chinese domain name. Chinese has two scripts for the same character, simplified and traditional. Someone may have already registered the simplifed version of a domain, preventing you from registering the traditional version.

Unfortunately, due to the current design of the COM/NET registry, we can not check if a variant exists ahead of time. We can only try to register the domain and if a variant exists, we get an error message. Then we automatically give you an account credit for any domains we could not register.

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2. Did the rules for COM / NET IDNs change?

Yes, there are new rules concerning COM / NET IDN registrations. These rules were changed on 03/21/2005. Listed below are the rules that were put into place:

  1. VeriSign is temporarily taking a more restrictive approach as to what characters are permitted within IDN registrations that contain the ENG and GER language tags. Specifically:
    • Domains registered with the language tag of ENG will only be allowed for registrations that consist of characters a-z, 0-9, and -. The reason why we are retaining the ENG table is that in the future, we could add characters to the table which would make registrations using them in an IDN. However, in the interim, no new IDNs could be registered with a language tag containing the ENG value.
    • Domains registered with the language tag of GER will only allow for registrations that consist of characters a-z, 0-9, -, ä, ö, and ü. The ß character will continue to be disallowed however, as is currently the case, following the IDNA RFCs.
    • At this time, existing registrations that are tagged as ENG or GER will remain in the Zone and unaffected by this change. No changes in the future are envisioned except as noted in the following.
  2. With the exception of characters 0-9 and the dash, domains that commingle Latin and Cyrillic characters for any language tag will no longer be permitted. At this time VeriSign will not be making any changes to existing registrations that commingle Latin and Cyrillic characters. However, there may be a need in the future to place any existing registrations on REGISTRY-HOLD, for they may no longer comply to Registry specifications.

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3. Why can't I register the € character in my IDN?

For COM, NET, CC, & TV international domains, the € (euro symbol) is not allowed. From Verisign:

The Euro symbol is included in a set of codepoints that is blocked. There are some legacy registrations that contain the symbol, but new registrations are not allowed.

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4. What is punycode?

Punycode is a way to represent international domain names with the limited character set ('a'-'z', '0'-'9') supported by the domain name system. For example "münich" would be encoded as "mnich-kva".

An IDN takes the punycode encoding, and adds a 'xn--' in front of it. So "münich.com" would become "xn--mnich-kva.com".

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5. Why was my international domain name (IDN) not registered?

Sometimes our domain search will say that your IDN is available, but we will not be able to register the domain for you. The problem is caused by one of the following reasons:

  • You did not enter the correct language tag for your IDN. We can usually fix this for you by changing the language tag for your IDN. But to prevent delays, try to enter the correct language tag for your domain.
  • The IDN you entered contains characters that are not supported. The central registries do not support every character for every language. For example, in Greek there are some characters that are actually the combination of 2 simpler characters. The registry will support the simpler characters, but not the combined character.
  • A variant of the IDN already exists. Some languages have 2 ways to write the same character. For example, Chinese has traditional characters and simplified characters. If someone has registered the traditional version of your IDN, then you are not allowed to register the simplified version.
  • The IDN you entered combines two different languages. Sometimes combining characters from 2 different languages into one IDN is not allowed. For example, a domain containing Cyrillic characters can not also have English characters. This is because the Cyrillic alphabet is related to the English alphabet, and combining characters from both languages could lead to confusion. Other language combinations are allowed, like Chinese and English.

Unfortunately, the IDN domain search will not detect these errors. The errors can not be detected until we try to register your IDN. If for some reason your IDN can not be registered, you will be issued an account credit which you can use to register another domain.

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6. What is an International Domain Name (IDN)?

An IDN is a domain name that uses different characters than the letters a-z. For example, a German domain could use the umlaut character. Or a Chinese domain would use Chinese characters.

To see a sample IDN, type this into your browser:
www.xn--4gqx73hwke.com

To register a IDN, go here.
http://www.dynadot.com/domain/search2.html

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