Global by Design

The European Commission has announced that it will begin supporting domain registration in Greek and Cyrillic characters. This will allow for support of all 23 official EU languages.

The EC hasn’t announced when registrations will be possible. I took a stab at registering a Cyrillic domain name and got an “invalid domain” error. My guess is that we’re looking at FY10 before this becomes a reality — as ICANN is progressing slowly on a formal process for registering IDNs (internationalized domain names).

But the announcement is good news because it gives ICANN another reason to push ahead.

• IDNs become a presidential issue
• IDNs on are the “fast track”
• Here comes IDNs
• The coming gTLD explosion (or not)
• Where is China’s fast-track IDN?
• ICANN Goes Global — Gradually