.org : Chinese characters now possible for .org

It will be possible to register .org domains with Chinese IDNs from 23 January 2010 on a first-come, first-served basis.

.org with Chinese characters

The .org IDN domain name will be allowed to contain Chinese characters, ASCII characters (a-z), numbers (0-9) and hyphen (-). The Chinese domain MUST however contain at least one (1) Chinese character. A request to register a Chinese IDN domain name must specify whether the domain is either simplified Chinese (ZH-CN) or traditional Chinese (ZH-TW). The length will be limited to fourteen (14) characters. E.g.: 中国互联网络信息中心.ORG

All .org Chinese IDN domain names registered between 23 January 2010 and 22 February 2010 will be placed on Server Update Prohibited status until 25 March 2010 to allow any Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) disputes to be initiated. While locked, the IDN domain names will not resolve and cannot be updated, deleted or transferred. This will provide intellectual property owners an opportunity to identify any potential infringements of their rightful Chinese IDN domain names.

IDN buzz

These years every respectable top level domain introduces IDN - internationalized domain names - if users of these domains use other characters than a-z. German script IDNs were launched on 15 January 2005, followed by Danish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Korean (Hangul), Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish and Swedish IDNs on 23 July 2005 and Spanish IDNs on 03 March 2007.

With ICANN´s change of regulation on Oct 30 we will see several country code domains where the complete domain will be in other characters than Latin. .рф, the new Cyrillic domain in Russia is the first of this kind, but many more will follow next year.

New Internet users will know that they can write a shortcut in the URL in their own language, and that is why you should make sure to register your Chinese IDN domain names in time. We have created a waiting list, so you can apply for your .ORG domains below already today. We will queue them for the launch on Jan 23.