Czech people don’t want IDNs
While Russia’s recently launched all-Cyrillic domain names may be going down a storm, it seems the idea of internationalized domain names does not have international appeal.
A survey of businesses and individuals in the Czech Republic shows a serious lack of support for IDNs under the .cz TLD.
A shocking 87% of organizations, along with 62% of internet users, surveyed by registry CZ.NIC said they were not in favor of .cz IDNs.
Czech uses the Latin alphabet, of course, albeit with a liberal dose of diacritics – the local name of the country is Česká Republika – so there’s less of a pressing need for IDNs than in other nations.
The survey results were less surprising to those in the know. Ondrej Filip, executive director of the .cz registry, said in a statement:
The repeated refusal of IDN was not a surprise. The last three surveys had very similar results and there have been no signs over the last two years pointing towards a change in this trend. Quite the opposite – in the long term, the negative attitude of the Czech Internet public toward IDN is growing.
The results showed slightly growing support for IDNs among individual users and growing opposition from businesses. Some objected on the basis that it would make life hard for foreign visitors.
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That comes as no surprise, the main reason being that while Russians use the Cyrillic alphabet, the Czech simply use the Latin one with accents. For the same reason a Hungarian or even Turkish “IDN” TLD would not make it. On the other hand, a Greek IDN TLD would – if only the market were large enough (it isn’t).
I recall the Germans were quite keen on getting IDNs.
A lot of .ru owners were/still are against idn.rf domains. Again this week a top internet marketing guy posted a rant on snob.ru
In my opinion, this is just fear of change at work.
“would make life hard for foreign visitors” these are clearly the words of someone who doesn’t understand domains. Probably someone who thought that only one domain could point at a given webpage.
Anyways, when people start to mix “IDNs” with “foreigners”, they are clearly off the tracks, no doubt.
Thanx for interesting perspective! I asked Andrew Alleman if he saw any IDN’s on advertising around, and he answered, they’re not available yet!
http://domainnamewire.com/2010/10/04/greetings-from-the-land-of-cz
@ Acro
Let’s be clear. This is about enabling second level IDNs under the existing top level domain .cz
The Czech Republic along with France are two of the few ‘Euro’ countries using a Latin-based script which don’t allow second level IDNs. [As opposed to Germany, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia…]
Even that is changing as France is scheduled to introduce IDNs under .fr by 2015.
And yes, as the owner of some pretty decent Czech IDN-dot-coms, I can attest that the Czechs don’t usually like to type in words using diacritics.