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- ICANN publishes its Woke Manifesto. Here’s my hot take
- Alibaba, Name.com among new RDRS opt-ins
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- Internet could get one-letter gTLDs (but there’s a catch)
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- Epik gets acquired again! The plot thickens…
- Airline gTLD crashes and burns
- First chunks of new gTLD Applicant Guidebook drop
- Epik to reveal its owners soon
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- Internet Naming Co acquires five more gTLDs
Forget emojis, you can buy Egyptian hieroglyph .com domains
Kevin Murphy, June 16, 2017, Domain Registries
Call them the Emojis of the Ancient World.
Egyptian hieroglyphs were once the cutting edge of written communication, and it turns out Verisign lets you register .com domains using them.
Internationalized domain names expert Andre Schapp discovered a couple months ago that the Unicode code points for the ancient script have been approved in 16 Verisign gTLDs, and apparently no others.
This means that domains such as 
should resolve.
Unfortunately, DI’s database does not support these characters, so I’m having to use images.
But at least one domain investor seems have snapped up a few dozen single-pictograph Egyptian hieroglyph names about a month ago, and his page has clickable links.
Whether you see the hieroglyph or the Punycode, prefixed “xn--“, seems to depend on your browser configuration.
Ancient Egyptian is apparently not the only dead script that Verisign supports.
According to IANA, you can also get .com domains in Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform, which went out of fashion in the second century CE, as well Phoenician, the world’s oldest known script.
Then there’s Imperial Aramaic, Meitei, Kharosthi, ‘Phags-pa, Sylheti Nagari and goodness knows how many other extinct writing systems.
It seems .com has been approved for 237 IDN scripts, in total. Let it not be said that Verisign does not offer domainers ample opportunity to spunk their cash on gibberish.
No Klingon, though.
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