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02/07/07

IDNs will soon be available for .be names

DNS Belgium, the Belgian organization in charge of Belgian domain name registration, has recently decided to allow special characters such as é, è and ë in domain names. Such domain names are also called IDNs. IDN is the abbreviation of Internationalized Domain Name, which is a domain name that has been adapted to the language of a certain country and in which non-standard ASCII characters are allowed.

This means that you’ll soon be able to use domain names and e-mail addresses such as www.nestlé.be or guy@belgië.be, which is something that wasn’t possible up till now.

How does this work?

Your web browser or e-mail client (such as Internet Explorer or Outlook) interprets these codes automatically for you.

For instance, when you type belgië.be, your browser or e-mail client will translate this (internally) into e.g. xn—belgi-rsa.be. This request is then sent to the DNS servers so that the requested website can be displayed on your browser.

How will integration and registration take place?

Character sets are defined and only Dutch, French, German and English character sets will be accepted.

Of course, there will be a Sunrise period, most likely to guarantee priority rights to brand names, companies and people who wish to use their surname.

The procedure will probably take place in several phases according to priority rights and during a given period.

There are currently 2 scenarios for this Sunrise period.

Scenario 1: You submit your IDN request and the validation of domains happens according to the « first come, first served » policy. All non-validated domain names at the end of the Sunrise period will be blocked and a Landrush period sets in.

Scenario 2: Requests for validation during a given period. Each request is submitted and processed in order to attribute the domain name. No « first come, first served » policy will be applied here. Thus, everybody has the same chances to register his IDN. At a given point, registrations will be validated; although a (pre-)validation code will be necessary to attribute the domain name to you.

The exact launch date for these IDNs hasn’t yet been defined, but COMBELL will keep you posted so that you too will be able to register your IDN through our services. 

 

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