As of 1 March next year the Müllers, Jägers and Schröders of the world will no longer have to make do with transcribing their names as mueller.de, jaeger.de or schroeder.de if they want to use them for Internet domains.
DENIC, SWITCH and nic.at, the registries for domains in Germany, Switzerland/Liechtenstein and Austria, are to join forces to expand their domain name systems to allow for a total of 92 additional new characters – including umlauts, as well as French characters such as é or the Danish ø.
Currently, anyone wishing to register a domain is still restricted to the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, the digits 0-9 and hyphens. In numerous cases (such in the examples of Schröder, Müller or Jäger), these restrictions clearly do not allow for domains to appear in their correct form. However, the new system will increase the number of possible characters by 92 for Germany and Austria and by 31 for Switzerland, allowing for a whole new range of possibilities for businesses and individuals to choose from.
However, there remains one character that German-speaking Internet users will have to do without in future: ß. According to international language guidelines, this is equivalent to ss – and so it would not be possible to distinguish between the domains straße.de and strasse.de.
While there are obvious benefits to German speakers by being able to register domains with umlauts and other characters, IDNs (Internationalised Domain Names) do have their downside, especially to trade mark holders. For example, the domain “müller.de” could be registered by a domain squatter or a speculator to divert traffic from a pre-existing domain name “muller.de”. For most businesses, it is simply uneconomical and impractical to register every variation of a trade mark. So domain watching services and monitoring of domain spaces to check for infringing registrations will become of critical importance.
Businesses with an on-line presence will have to keep a close eye on the development of new technologies such as IDN’s to ensure their intellectual property rights are suitably protected wherever they are represented in the world. Demys will, of course, keep you posted.