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Afilias to apply for Chinese .info

Kevin Murphy, November 8, 2011, 11:27:16 (UTC), Domain Registries

Afilias has announced that it plans to apply for the traditional and simplified Chinese script equivalents of .info under ICANN’s new generic top-level domains program.
The company becomes the last of the Big Three registries to give a glimpse into its new gTLD strategy.
VeriSign has said it wants transliterations of .com in multiple scripts, while Neustar has said it plans to apply for its own dot-brand, .neustar.
Afilias did not disclose the exact strings it wants in its announcement. There was no mention of .mobi, which the company also runs.
According to the last official count, there are close to 7.9 million registered .info domains. Marketing director Roland LaPlante said in September that about 19% host unique web sites.

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Comments (5)

  1. M says:

    PIR also plans to apply for internationalized domain name transliterations of .org, in Chinese, Hindi, Cyrillic and Arabic, Cute said.
    http://domainincite.com/pir-sets-its-sights-on-ngo/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DomainIncite+%28DomainIncite.com%29

  2. moris says:

    They can apply and so can you and if you have the $185K + reserves and same goes for any other language (contrary to belief of some people).
    They don’t own .info.
    There would be no confusion either, b/c if there is- then .co would be confusing with .com or confusing with .co.uk.
    I wonder if in some languages they will alias the ascii to the IDN which would make the Castello brothers quite happy. On the other hand they might not alias at all.
    Bottom line is that the Chinese couldn’t care less about IDN’s.. they go for numbers and still go for regular ascii domains.
    There is way to much supply compared to demand.

  3. Steve says:

    I think international gtld’s with the .com extension will benefit the most from the new gtld program.
    Right now you can type the left of the dot in your native language and in about 1 year the .com will also be in your native language. This move opens the internet up to another 1 billion users that DON’T speak English!
    Looking forward to all these new surfers visiting domains in their native languages.
    Companies that don’t pay attention to these new surfers will miss out.
    Unfortunately many did not realize the value of a keyword generic English domain name so I am sure many, many will miss the boat on IDN.com opportunities.
    With registries acknowledging the value of the .info extension in Chinese, how valuable will a Chinese or Spanish or Russian .com be?
    Cheers.

  4. moris says:

    They can apply but so can you if you have $185K to spare.
    They have no rights to it. It would be interesting to see what they will do with languages that do no exist as idn.info. Will they alias the .com in English as the Castello brothers would like? Or would it be free for all.. They might even decide not to alias the existing idn.info
    In any event, it doesn’t matter as they only care about numbers and regular ascii domains.
    To much supply but no demand..

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