[idn] Verisign's i-Nav plug-in services - will this become the de facto IDN standard?

["Peter Gustav Olson - pgo" <pgo@psglaw.dk>]

Verisign has now apparently struck a deal with Microsoft whereby the Internet Explorer 5.0+ now supports Verisign's internationalized domain names (IDN's)

http://www.verisign.com/corporate/news/2003/pr_20030114b.html

These are now being marketed actively here in Denmark.

If you key in an IDN in Internet Explorer, it asks you if you want to download the i-Nav plug in, which goes very quickly. Thereafter you can key in all the IDNs that Verisign has sold in the testbed. For example "Ĝl" means beer, and ĝl.com was sold to Carlsberg. Check out www.ĝl.com. You will see that it actually hops to a third level under .mltbd.com ("Multilingual testbed"?)

 

 

The problem, as I see it, is that it works too well. In that respect it reminds me of Real Names Internet Keywords, which Microsoft thankfully stopped supporting

Any thoughts on whether we should register IDN's - or is this just a waste of money while we await ICANN's take on this?

Yours sincerely
Peter Olson