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GMO to apply for .yokohama
Kevin Murphy,
March 18, 2012, 12:08:29 (UTC),
Domain Registries
GMO Registry has said it has obtained government consent to apply to ICANN for yet another Japanese city top-level domain.
This time it’s .yokohama for Yokohama, which with 3.7 million inhabitants is Japan’s second-largest city.
GMO has also been successful in bids for support for .tokyo, .osaka and .kyoto applications.
Other Japanese geo-gTLDs expected to be applied for include .okinawa, .sendai, .wakayama and .ryukyu.
Why ASCII TLDs ?
Great question. I’m sorry to say I don’t know the answer.
Hi Kevin,
It looks like my email about .Kyoto must have been filtered and spam. GMO is not involved with .kyoto.
It looks like the ICANN wiki info is incorrect as well.
JS, IDNs in Japan just don’t seem to have any steam. I was hoping the New TLD program would change that, but it appears all the governments are being very specific about giving support only for the ASCII versions. Here is an interesting article on the subjet: http://www.circleid.com/posts/89228_japan_domain_name_market/
Good spot, thanks.
@JS
that article is 4 years old, that’s a lifetime in internet years.
The acid test will be how well received the Japanese dot-com-in-idn is, once versign (apply for and) release it, as part of the new TLD process
@Jacob
that article is 4 years old, that’s a lifetime in internet years.
The acid test will be how well received the Japanese dot-com-in-idn is, once versign (apply for and) release it, as part of the new TLD process
Gary, thanks! I should have pointed that out when I posted the link.
JPRS has lost 10k IDN registrations from 2010 to 2011 according to their most recent report. The registrations dropping could simply be because mixture of IDN.ASCII is just not intuitive. IDN.JP is back down to the level it was at in 2007 which tells me that registrants haven’t really found a decent use for them.
Most industry guys here in Japan really don’t think that a .コム is very attractive. Give me an IDN that actually has a meaning in Japanese and then maybe there would be some potential.