Hello everyone,

I exchanged a few messages with Lars earlier this year, and would like to present below some points he raised that should be useful both for the IGF next week and looking towards ICANN meeting C next year, being tailored towards German stakeholders. In my view, we can aim to always try gathering such regional insights moving forward to optimize our engagement.

Special characters: Eszett (ß) and Umlaut (ü) have fallback options by default:

• Eszett becomes "ss".
• Capital Eszett (ẞ) has only recently been introduced officially to the language, meaning that anything in capital letters used to be written using "SS" even on the press.
• Umlaut characters (ä, ö, ü) become "ae", "oe", "ue".
  

gTLDs

• Fallback: the popular cityTLD for "Köln" is run under ".koeln" and ".cologne" to avoid the Umlaut.
• ".berlin" is a popular gTLD and is in active use for varied purposes, including local businesses.
• Other relevant gTLDs: ".hamburg", ".bayern", ".ruhr", ".nrw" and ".saarland".
  

Hopefully this can help us engage better. Safe journeys to all of those traveling to the IGF!

Regards,

-- 
Mark W. Datysgeld from Governance Primer [www.markwd.website]
In partnership with AR-TARC and the Brazilian Association of Software Companies (ABES)