NP just wanted to clarify my position.

I grant you that you did not call out IDN’s in your post.

But IDN gtld’s are equally eligible for the new GTLD program as ASCII gtld’s.

Thomey and Beckstrom have confirmed this in 3 different sessions at least , of transcripts that I have read from the Sydney conference.

IDN gtld’s are a subset of GTLD’s to be sure in 2010.

But Tina Dam ICANN/ IDN lead believes that IDN gtld submissions/ or Non English ASCII gtld’s will equal and then surpass English ASCII gtld submissions in short order after 2010,
when the cctld fast track and gtld processes are essentially combined in 2011.

This dichotomy of ASCII and IDN ‘s will be irrelevant to 2 billion users on mobile phones
by 2011.

My apologies for not being specific on this particular point earlier when commenting on
Michael’s post etc….

thanks…

Steve

Just to point out that I did not mention, 1 item in the post about IDN.

All these comments are directed to Michael C’s comments and have nothing to do with the post.

ICANN is finally stepping on the gas with IDNs after decade of what many see as having been dragging their feet. What is “new” is IDN.IDN where we will see a few “sunrises” later this year, but most of the action will be 2010 and on. Other than Russian, who are restricting sunrise to passport holders, most of the idn.com and idn.ccTLD are taken in most languages and idn.com, idn.net, idn.cn, idn.jp etc etc are expected to “alias” to the various languages (where possible) to bring those into the fold to become idn.idn.

To many peoples surprise, they are just “discovering” that IDN.com, IDN.net IDN.jp, IDN.cn etc have been around and many registered since the year 2000 for .com, 2003 and on for .jp etc. Unfortunatly Microsoft did not provide IDN compatable browsers (until IE7) and that has been the main holdback to their popularity and use during this time. The recent idn.idn publicity in Russia alone has ramped up idn.com traffic immensely, and the same is expected to happen across the board with other languages as they publicize and implement idn.idn. The reality is that the IDN train left the station long ago, and the IDN “gold” was also long ago registered and already onboard.

IDN cctld fast track for JP CN and RF is locked down based on the media in Japan, China, and Russia..

Verisign is going to use DNAME for making IDN dot com into IDN dot IDN for a dozen languages +. Probably direct mapping for a dozen others.

With regard to gtld’s, again new GTLD’s are going to be ASCII and IDN together from the start.
Very important for Arabic and Urdu because of right to left typing.

but on the domainer risk front:

55% of Japanese watch mobile TV on their 3G phones.

It is called ‘Keitai TV or Keitai Teribi …. teribi being an alliteration of television but shortened etc…

And ‘tv ‘ is very common in ASCII in Japan and elsewhere in the world of course..

I own the 4 possible combinations in dot JP and dot com to own the IDN category for the 2 words in katakana. (used 10X more than kanji on phones )

keitai teribi
keitai tv

ケータイテレビ.com
ケータイテレビ.jp
ケータイtv.jp
ケータイtv.com

As an entrepreneur, I thought grabbing the 4 names was prudent.
I do not intend to sell them or develop them separately.

Am I injuring mobileTV.com or mobile.tv ???

I really doubt it.

Am I injuring in any way mobileTV.jp …in Japanese in their own country ???

No…since generic words can’t be copyrighted there either….

Keitai means mobile, handheld, and also portable .

Every language is going to have its peculiarities.

So will Bullion.com lose Chinese and Japanese traffic…..
I guess a little bit.

but if it were to develop great Chinese and Japanese landing page content …it would have nothing to fear.

the days of search engine ‘ keyword box’ for type in traffic are about to decline a great deal for
English words from foreign language translations on the fly in Asia.

Not so much for European Latin based languages of course…

generic IDN’s will get a lot of that traffic in many cases because Google weights the domain name heavily if there is real and frequently changed content there.

English word dominance ends around the world when the Web is on one’s phone…

2009 : 4 billion mobile phones……500 million truly web-capable
2009: 1 billion PC’s

regards,

Steve

If you wanted ascii.com to be protected from idn.com you should have sorted it out in 2001. You missed the boat by nearly a decade.

Translation is a two way street. In order for me to register 地金.com I would need to first translate an English word. If there is no reference in the other language there is no harm done. But if there is a match translation then there is a chance for confusion. Look, I am not saying that if I own Italy.com I should have rights to Italia.com, be but when you use cyrillic.ascii there is going to be confusion. Make it cyrillic.cyrillic or ascii.ascii

The end result of what I am worried about is if someone in China IS trying to get to our Bullion.com, will they. That is a fair question.