Here’s a new article I’ve written for UX Magazine on the emergence of internationalized domain names (IDNs). I view IDNs as an inevitable (albeit awkward) evolution of the Internet.
And here are the previous two articles I’ve written for UX Magazine:
So it’s official now. The Republic of South Sudan is a country.
In case you’re curious what you have to do to become a country, here’s a brief list.
The list fails to mention the need for a country code. In fact, I would put a country code right up there with international recognition.
And, as Paul Sawers at Next Web wisely noted, South Sudan is facing a country code dilemma.
As illustrated above (based on my ccTLD map), South Sudan has applied for the .SS country code.
Needless to say, this is a rather loaded acronym, and many feel that it won’t be approved.
But there aren’t many alternatives. Sudan already has .SD. The .su (Soviet Union) domain could be redelegated except for the fact that there are people still using that domain for legacy sites. So I would imagine the .SU route could be a bit challenging, though it appears to be the best linguistic fit.
What other domains are available that begin with the letter S? I found SF, SP, SQ, SX, and SW.
Slim pickings.
That’s the tough part about being a brand new country — you’re last in line for the country codes. Now, South Sudan could get a little crazy and apply for .AA or .YY, which are also available. Though I can’t imagine they would get approval.
What do you think?
Verisign published its quarterly industry brief a few weeks ago.
In it, the guide includes the top 10 ccTLDs, reprinted below: 
There are now more than 81 million registered ccTLD domains, which comprise about 40% of all registered domain names. Verisign says ccTLD registrations increased nearly 8% over last year. This is impressive given that China has really cracked down on .cn registrations over the past two years. For a brief period of time China was the leading country code, though a large percentage of these registrations were squatters. Here are the top 10 ccTLDs in late 2009:
So Germany is now firmly back in first place and China has fallen to fifth place.
But China may actually be in sixth place if you include IDNs.
I don’t believe IDN registrations are included in the ccTLD counts. For most countries, this isn’t a big deal because ccTLDs counts are quite low. But then there is Russia, with more than 800,000 registrations for .РФ. If you were to bundle IDN and ccTLD counts together, then Russia would surpass China and squeeze into fifth place.
Paul Sawers of The Next Web has written an in-depth article on the evolution of internationalized domain names (IDNs).
It’s a great article for quickly getting up to speed on how non-Latin domains work on the Internet and how they’ve been doing over the past year since they went live. To be clear, although what I call partial IDNs have been around for many years it was only until last year that you could register a full-length IDNs – that is, both the domain name plus the country code in the local script (Cyrillic, Arabic, etc). And it is full-length IDNs that promise to change the way millions of people search for and use web sites.
Here’s the article.
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