[Clicked on Send too early apologie -- patrick ] On Wed, 30 Dec 2009 12:34:32 +0100, Vittorio Bertola <vb@bertola.eu> wrote:
Just imagine what would happen if someone else now registered the properly spelled version, "università.com", which would possibly come out higher in search engine queries for "università", be seen as the "correct" version by the users, and in the end undermine the original website and business.
People would have a reasonable expectation that, once the proper "accented" version becomes available, people having registered the non-accented version would have priority in getting it. (Actually, the original expectation was that a variants system would be developed for accented Latin characters, so to avoid the problem altogether.)
However, no one at ICANN seemed interested in the issue - actually, no one even seemed to understand it. Everyone was just focused on two issues - introduce a bigger market by allowing new domain names, and keeping the governments from non-Latin countries happy.
I concur. We had a advisory committee meeting of the .lu ccTLD some months ago, and one of the issues on the table were IDNs, and how to prevent user confusion. Right now for example, all the public authorities are grouped under the "etat.lu" domain. Citizens expect to find the same web site under "état.lu". If they would find another unrelated web site, that would somehow hurt the trust relationship between the citizen and the state. We finally decided to have a sunrise period where existing domain name registrants could register the IDN variants of the existing domain name. Now, this is pretty easy for a TLD with 50.000 registrations and three latin character-based languages. Obviously, that does not scale for millions of registrations in gTLDs and all possible IDN variants. The short answer to Joly's original question is that one should exercise their own judgement as to the relevance to make defensive registrations. If I do not plan to do business in Japan, why should I register the domain name in Japanese script or even care ? And in case of an abusive registration by a third party there is always the UDRP and other legal actions. Patrick