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Second dot-brand gets ICANN contract

Kevin Murphy, October 15, 2013, 09:26:28 (UTC), Domain Registries

CITIC Group has signed a new gTLD Registry Agreement with ICANN, the second dot-brand to do so.
The Chinese financial services giant signed on the dotted line for .中信, the Chinese-script version of its company name.
The company has also applied for .citic, but that application is a little further down ICANN’s processing queue.
A little over two weeks ago, Samsung became the first dot-brand to enter into an ICANN registry contract.
CITIC becomes the 58th new gTLD with a contract, though 613 have been invited to contracting.
UPDATE: Oops! Thanks to the reader who alerted me to the fact that .中信 is actually the third dot-brand with a contract. The gTLD .otsuka (which is a Japanese pharmaceuticals company and not, as I thought, a geographic region) was in fact the second. I regret the error.

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Comments (3)

  1. Kassey says:
    October 15, 2013 at 8:50 pm

    I think the pharmaceuticals company is wise in that it did not apply for .大塚 (its Japanese name) but went for ASCII characters .otsuka. Internet means global reach, so why limit yourself to a small subset of the global population? A certain level of English is commonly used by Japanese so adopting .otsuka is not a problem even in Japan. I still think ASCII domain names will be much more popular than IDN names in Japan etc, because it’s much easier to type all characters in ASCII. Mixing ASCII with IDN makes it more difficult to type, as you need to switch in and out of the IDN mode on your keyboard. Unless ICANN allows the IDN equivalent of the dot “.” in domain names.

    Reply
  2. a 日本人 says:
    October 16, 2013 at 1:52 am

    Kassey
    You can use “。” (japanese equivalent of “.”) instead of “.”
    Please try “例え。テスト”, ”amazon。com” or whatever on your browser.

    Reply
  3. Kassey says:
    October 16, 2013 at 2:48 am

    @a 日本人. Just tried amazon。com. I didn’t know browsers can detect “。” and automatically change it to “.” as in amazon。com. Thanks.

    Reply

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