Dynadot Help

International Domain Names (IDNs)

• Did the rules for .COM and .NET IDNs change?

  Yes, there are new rules concerning .COM and .NET Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) registrations. These rules were changed on 03/21/2005. Listed below are the rules that were put into place: Verisign, the central registry of .COM and .NET , is 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. 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.

• I was searching for a domain and received a "charset problem" message. What does this mean?

  This error means that our system was unable to parse the domain name you are searching. In most cases, the Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) you entered combines two different languages. Sometimes combining characters from two different languages into one IDN is not allowed. Our system will try to match your entry to all languages before issuing this error.