In January of this year, ICANN announced that four fast-track IDNs had made it through linguistic approval — effectively clearing the way for commercialization.

Oddly missing from that list was China’s IDN.

One of the reasons ICANN initiated a fast-track process — if not the reason — was China.

China began putting pressure on ICANN a few years back by registering second-level IDNs and hinting that it would offer full-length IDNs if ICANN didn’t get moving. China’s Internet is essentially an intranet after all, so there is no reason the country couldn’t resolve full-length IDNs next week if it wanted.

Perhaps China’s IDN has already been approved ICANN has simply not gotten around to announcing it.

Still, I find the silence curious. Which is why I was interested to read that the president of ICANN, Rod Beckstrom, traveled to China recently.

This article posits that China’s IDN application was one of the issues behind his trip.

What do you think? Is China’s IDN being used as leverage by ICANN?

If you want to know the world’s most dangersous ccTLDs, ask an anti-virus software company.

McAfee has released its list of most dangerous country codes. Here are the top five:

1. Cameroon (.cm)
2. PR of China (.cn)
3. Samoa (.ws)
4. Philippines (.ph)
5. Former Soviet Union (.su)

Why is Camerooon at the top of the list?

Because .cm is a common typo by users who intended to type .com.

According to McAfee, more than 30% of all domains registered under .cm are up to no good.

I have a business idea for Verisign — why not license .cm and bundle it with .com registrations to give users a more secure domain package. I could see many companies paying for this.

China is number two. The country has made efforts recently to clean up its domain by requiring business licenses of its registrants. Some of the Western media have misinterpreted this as censorship. That’s one of the great ironies of managing top-level domains. You kinda have to keep a close eye on what the registrants are doing with these domains if you want to ensure a safer Internet.

But I digress.

And what are the safest ccTLDs? Here are the top five:

1. Japan (.jp)
2. Ireland (.ie)
3. Croatia (.hr)
4. Luxembourg (.lu)
5. Vanuatu (.vu)

You can view a larger map here.

But IDNs aren’t the only new country codes to keep your eyes on.

There is also the occasional new Latin-based ccTLD.

Like .IC.

The Canary Islands is looking to get a country code to raise its visibility.

That, and also to bring in a few million dollars in registration fees. Just imagine all the Bay Area startups that would relish a funky new combo-ccTLD name.

Plast.ic.

Elast.ic.

Bombast.ic.

Am I sounding a bit sarcast.ic?

Of course, the gap between asking for a ccTLD and actually getting one can be quite significant. First you have to be included in the ISO 3166-1 list of country codes.

According to Wikipedia, here’s how you do it:

Currently 246 countries, territories, or areas of geographical interest are assigned official codes in ISO 3166-1. According to the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency (ISO 3166/MA), the only way to enter a new country name into ISO 3166-1 is to have it registered in one of the following two sources:^[6]

• United Nations Terminology Bulletin Country Names, or
• Country and Region Codes for Statistical Use of the UN Statistics Division.

To be listed in the bulletin Country Names, a country must either be:

• A member country of the United Nations,
• A member of one of its specialized agencies, or
• A party to the Statute of the International Court of Justice.

The list of names in Country and Region Codes for Statistical Use of the UN Statistics Division is based on the bulletin Country Names and other UN sources.

Once a country name or territory name appears in either of these two sources, it will be added to ISO 3166-1 by default.

That last I checked, Canary Islands is not on either of these two lists.

That said, I have a feeling that the Canary Islands will get its wish, although it might take some time. The IC acronym has already been reserved on its behalf and the Islands would not be the first autonymous territory to get its own ccTLD. The rest is just lawyers, lobbying, etc.

It’s funny how top-level domain names (TLDs) outlast the countries they represent.

In 2007 I wrote about the end of .YU (Yugoslavia), though it didn’t exactly go away back then.

Stephane Gelder writes that the TLD for Yugoslavia expires officially in a week, to be replaced by .RS (Serbia).

So this is it. Goodbye .YU. It was nice knowing you.

Speaking of domains that won’t die. .SU is still with us. I’m not sure that one will ever die. It’s become one of those retro domains that Russians don’t want to let go of. And I understand the attraction.

Domains are the street signs of our digital lives and it’s hard to let them go.

In case you’re wondering, I did not include .YU in the poster.

So Bit.ly has launched an even shorter URL: J.mp.

You can’t get any shorter than this, at least not until we see single-digital TLDs.

I can’t help but wonder if this new URL is a sign that Bit.ly is planning to shift away from its Libyan-dependent domain to one that may be a tad bit more politically stable.

And you could argue that .MP does the trick. It is the domain of the Northern Mariana Islands. It’s also a part of the US (in some legal fashion that I don’t fully understand), which has to make the lawyers at Bit.ly breathe more easily.

So my prediction is that Bit.ly will be replaced by J.mp. And though Bit.ly might play up the shorter angle for the reason why, I think it’s the legal angle that matters more.

PS: I added J.mp to a growing list of these branded country code domains.

That’s because it’s supported by WordPress.

It’s also the world’s first two-letter Montenegro (.me) domain.

Even though I use Bit.ly on Twitter, I still have concerns about what would happen if Libya clamped down on its ccTLD (link).

The only bummer about wp.me: You have to host a blog on WordPress to take advantage of it.

PS: I’ve created a new post dedicated to the ever-growing list of “countryless ccTDLs.”

And perhaps I was right in more ways than one.

Because now it appears that .CN is experiencing its very own .COM bust.

Just a year ago Chinese domain registrations were booming, so quickly in fact that .CN had surpassed .DE to become the most-registered ccTLD.

Of course, registrations were cheap, really cheap.

A year later, those domains have come up for renewal. And, according to Domain Pulse, more than a million of those domains have not been renewed:

Registrations for .CN have declined from an end-of-month peak of 14,082,553 in February 2009 to 12,545,589, a decline of approximately 1.5 million

Which means Germany (.DE), at just under 13 million registrations, has regained the top spot as the number one ccTLD.

Even with ccTLDs, there are peaks and troughs, as illustrated here:

I’m still confident that .CN will reign supreme (perhaps until .IN gives it some competition).

But first it must recover from this little bubble.

Bit.ly, the URL shortener now used by Twitter, is not the first company to craft its name out of a county code top-level domain (ccTLD).

But Bit.ly does appear to be the first company to do so with the Libyan ccTLD.

As some have speculated, Bit.ly could put itself into a precarious position should it begin hosting URLs for the adult industry, or any other industry that violates Libyan laws. It’s always important to keep in mind that a company can’t “own” a domain the way it owns real estate.

But this is all just speculation. The registrar Libyan Spider clearly is hoping to capitalize on all the “ly” permutations of a word or brand name. And the fact of the matter is that more and more countries are viewing their country codes as profit centers.

Which leads me to a brief inventory of the sites that I am aware of that use ccTLDs as part of their names:

• Delicio.us (USA)
• Pdk.to (Tonga)
• Short.LA (Laos)
• fav.or.it (Italy)
• good.is (Iceland)
• drop.io (British Indian Ocean Territory)
• MyID.is (Iceland)
• Outside.in (India)
• imo.im (Isle of Man)
• Tr.im (Isle of Man)
• Pi.pe (Peru)
• notify.me (Montenegro)
• Rafi.ki (Kiribati)
• Su.pr (Puerto Rico)
• look.fo (Faroe Islands)

I’m rather surprised at the range of countries represented here. Montenegro, by the way, has already sold more than 250,000 domains so far. Not bad for a country that’s less than a few years old.

Any companies that I missed?

UPDATE: Thanks to the commenter below I’ve added Tri.im — and I also came across Pi.pe. Any more I should include?

UPDATE 2: Just added Su.pr — yet another URL shortener.

UPDATE 3: Added good.is

UPDATE 4: Added Look.fo.  Faroe Islands. Go figure.

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.

Turns out, most companies haven’t even registered Twitter accounts for their primary brands.

Like who?

Apple, for one.

Here we have someone who apparently likes apples but isn’t Apple:

It appear that Microsoft reserved its account early on, though nothing is there. Microsoft does have about a dozen Twitter accounts that do include content.

Coke — someone who drinks Coke, but not the company.

While Pepsi does have a Twitter account.

The Wall Street Journal has an article out about this domain name rush.

So many questions come to mind:

• Will Twitter enforce trademarks for valid holders? Usually, the WIPO does this with domain names, but this isn’t actually a domain name in the traditional sense.
• What percentage of the millions of new Twitter accounts being registered every day simply squatters hoping to make a quick buck? That is, how much of Twitter’s growth actual growth?
• And what about third-party domain marketplaces — will we see them emerge? Or will Twitter start its own marketplace?

In the meantime, if you’re thinking about reserving a Twitter domain, do it now before getting Twit-jacked…

ICANN recently launched its own Twitter feed. And since ICANN is a global organization, it launched more than one language feed — one in English and one in Spanish.

http://twitter.com/icann_en

http://twitter.com/icann_es

This is not the most scalable solution. And I’m not trying to pick on Twitter; the issue effects any multinational company or organization.

For instance, let’s say ICANN launches a Portuguese feed for Brazil. The address would have to read twitter.com/icann_pt_br. Similar challenges arise with French (Canada vs. France). And even the English and Spanish feeds are inherently going to exclude various flavors of the languages.

In addition, if I were wanting to be a pain, I could register icann_ru to beat ICANN to that address. And this highlights a larger emerging issue (and opportunity) as Twitter becomes more corporate and less personal — how to ensure that brand holders have access to their names. I always thought this would be a nice revenue source for Twitter, similar to the way that registries profit from domain registrations.

Ideally, Twitter would allow you to set up one address and then forward language-specific feeds to the subscriber based on their preference — sort of like how language negotiation works now with Web browsers. For instance, if I type in Google.com, the language I get aligns with the language preference of my browser.

But therein lies the challenge of Twitter — it doesn’t just send feeds to a browser. It sends the feeds to browsers and mobile devices and even Twitter apps, like Tweetie, which I use on occasion.

ICANN is now migrating its subscribers from icann_en to icann. No word yet on what will happen with icann_es.

What do you think Twitter should do to solve this issue?

Someone is promoting the sale of a Chinese domain name, shown here. Technically, this domain is represented over the Internet as http://www.xn--45q.ws, which is the ASCII equivalent of the Chinese character — the DNS is still ASCII-only.

In China, the number 8 one of the best numbers to have on your license plate, phone number, etc — because of the way it’s pronounced. But this particular domain is attached to the .WS ccTLD, which is Western Samoa. As ccTLDs go, .WS is not exactly up there with .COM or .CN. So maybe that’s why the owner is promoting it so heavily — I came across this sale via a press release.

That’s an impressive ratio of people to domains — one ccTLD per 5.3 people — and it the highest ratio of any country with more than five million residents.

Germany comes in a close second, with a ratio of roughly one ccTLD per 6.5 people.

Granted, many of the owners of these .nl domains are not Dutch. Rather, they are multinational companies like FedEx and Apple.

But even if you take this into account, the Dutch registry SIDO claims that the Netherlands still has the highest density of domains, roughly 28 .NL domains per 1,000 people — a still impressive ratio.

Why is this I wonder?

The overwhelming majority of TLDs are country codes, most of which are included in the poster I published about a year ago.

Looking ahead, I would expect the “g” domains to multiply in number. These generic TLDs include domains such as .biz and .info. ICANN recently opened a call for applications to open gTLDs for governments and corporations.

New gTLDs could include “.coke” and “.paris.” It remains to be seen if companies are willing to put up the cash to get these domains, but I’m fairly certain a good many will.

But for now at least the total number of TLDs stands at 280.

It certainly has its proponents.

Paris and Berlin are also pursuing their own domains. But the reason I see .NYC gaining traction is that the proposed registrar dotNYC is promising to return a percentage of revenues to the city — and what city is going to turn down extra money these days?

According to the NYPost, “Anthony Van Couvering, CEO of a company called dotNYC, predicted roughly $3 million would flow into city coffers each year by the third year of the domain’s existence.”

This number assumes roughly a million registered domains, renewed annually. For a city of eight million, that may not sound like much, except when you consider that the United States, with 280 million people, has only registered a few million .US domains.

Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who supports the domain, said, “A local business won’t have to outbid a guy in Kansas to get TonysPizza.com. They’ll be able to get TonysPizza.nyc,” Quinn said.

It’s a nice thought, assuming that small businesses want their own .NYC domains. I’m sure many do. But how will the city keep the out-of-town squatters from taking TonysPizza before Tony gets to it?

Of all the city domains, .NYC certainly stands the best chance of succeeding. Perhaps it will become as coveted as 212 once was.

But just to be safe, city council members would be wise to study .LA — offered up in 2006 as a Los Angeles domain (by way of Laos). When’s the last time you visited a .LA Web site?

Stephane reports that the domain reached 3 million registrations today. Not too bad, considering that .US is still well under two million.

So who’s using this domain? Amazon is using it as a European placeholder; you can test it here.

BMW uses it only as a redirect domain. The same goes for IKEA and Siemens.

So while the jury is still out as to whether .EU will ever live up to the landing page potential of a ccTLD or a .COM, it has certainly proven to be popular. And I still maintain that it makes a great landing page for a European home page.

I think.

I first covered the “coming” of IDNs in 2000. Little did I know then that it would be such a long process.

Granted, IDNs already exist in the eyes of a number of registrars around the world. You can find an IDN registrar today on this list courtesy of Verisign.

But in the eyes of ICANN, IDNs aren’t yet official.

If you’re interested in the nitty gritty of what these ICANN-approved IDNs are going to look like, check out the fast track document. The document makes it clear that IDNs can only be derived from one script. In other words, we should see no mixing of, say, Latin and Cyrillic characters to create a bogus http://www.pаypal.com/ address (try the link out and see for yourself).

Countries that share a common official language will also need to work together to develop a consistent code table of accepted characters. I can see this being a particularly tricky process, depending on the countries involved.

But the good news here is that the number of obstacles appear to be decreasing in number. There are still some issues to be resolved — like how much money ICANN is going to expect for all this effort.

Will acquiring an IDN cost a registrar the same as a gTLD: $185,000?

Or will the fee be minimal in exchange for some type of revenue share based on registrations? All I do know is that there is demand for a fast-track process and the standards folks are now hashing out the final IDNA document.

Next year could be the year.

Really.

ICANN’s IDN site

Inspired by our Country Codes of the World map, I developed a smaller version that includes the ccTLDs currently in use by Google for its local search engines.

As you can see here, Google has quite a few ccTLDs in use — more than 160, including Andorra, Kenya, Ukraine, and Ghana.

Why did I pick Google?

Because I know of no other company that hosts localized Web sites across so many different country codes. These may only be search engine interfaces, but they are still significant. While plenty of multinationals have registered hundreds of ccTLDs, few have put them to use so extensively.

And Google has room to grow — there are more than 250 ccTLDs available.

It’s also worth noting that Google redirects visitors to its .US domain to .COM, which I think is short-sighted. As I’ve written before, .COM is not synonymous with USA.

I have a few other companies in mind for this visual treatment. I’ll keep you posted.

This map is free and you can download a PDF here.

Here’s a screen grab of the figures I want to focus on:

What makes this chart so interesting are the growth rates — .com is growing at 5% and .cn is growing at 18%. Granted, it’s easier to grow at 18% when you’ve only got 12 million registrations, compared with growing at 5% when you’ve got 76 million registrations.

But growth is growth and .cn is clearly on a roll.

And China has a lot of headroom for growth in terms of Web users and potential domain registrants. I am confident that .cn will reach 50 million registrations over the next 3 years.

At about that point in time, .com should be around 100 million registrants — in no danger of losing its number one status.

However, if the rate of growth of .com registrations were to decrease while .cn rate of growth continues to increase, it’s reasonable to wonder if we will one day see the number of .cn registrations surpass .com registrations?

I realize this is a far-fetched scenario.

After all, it’s reasonable to assume that companies that register .cn may also register .com — and the majority do just that.

But it’s certainly something to contemplate. And even if .cn never comes close to surpassing .com, the overall point I’d like to emphasize here is that .cn is now the world’s second most popular domain extention — and likely to remain that way for many years.

What do you think?

But here comes Google…

According to Blogoscoped, Google is about to launch the Google Translation Center.

This is an exciting development, though I don’t expect everyone to suddenly ditch ProZ for Google. Why? Because much of the appeal of ProZ is the community, which Google does not appear to be trying to support. Still, freelancers will certainly want to investigate this potential new resource.

I’ve called out ProZ as one company under threat from Google Translation Center. But EVERY translation agency needs to keep a close eye on this service. It could be a threat. It could also end up being something translation agencies use themselves — instead of paid platforms from SDL. Naturally, for this to happen this new platform has a lot of evolving to do. Still, I can’t help but wonder.

There is no mention of whether or not Google will support machine translation and/or translation memory. I’m assuming they will.

I have LOTS of questions and this service isn’t even live yet. So we shall see what happens. But this is big news, no question.

I wrote awhile back, that the translation industry as we know it is over. The technologists have taken over and they’re bringing brute force computing and massive networks to the table to reduce costs and increase time to market. This is just another sign of this macro trend.

What do you think? Is Google going to disrupt the translation industry or is this new platform going to fall flat?

(Thx Chris for the heads up!)

Update: I just read an insightful article on this Google’s service at GigaOm…

GoDaddy, the US registrar with rights to the much-hyped .me ccTLD, opened registration to the general public today and it looks like things have not gone all that smoothly.

TechCrunch reports that people received credit charges for domains they in fact did not successfully register. Apparently GoDaddy had server/load issues.

But if you want to register DomainUnavailable.me, the last I checked it was still available!

gTLDs are those domains to the right of the dot in the URL, such as .com and .biz. Currently there are 21 gTLDs. But going forward, there is no limit to the number of gTLDs that can be registered. A company could register one, a city could register one, even an individual.

The media are predicting a bewildering array of new gTLDs in the months ahead.

But I’m not so sure we’ll see such a domain land rush. For starters, the process and costs of getting approval for a new gTLD are going to eliminate only the most passionate (and well-funded) supporters.

In the near future, I do see domains such as .berlin (and other cities) and .sport (and other topical words) emerging.

The big question will be to what extent the corporate world participates in registering gTLDs. Will we see a .coke or .pepsi or .google emerge? Odds are pretty good that we’ll see a .google simply because Google can actually manage its domain fairly well. As for Coke or Pepsi, I’m not so sure. Which leads us to the need for third-party domain service providers who could help companies like Coke and Pepsi register and manage their gTLDs. I sense a nice business opportunity ahead.

The larger issue to emerge out of the recent ICANN meeting is the coming of IDNs, such as domain names in Cyrillic and Chinese. When the leaders of both China and Russia clamor for their own native-language URLs, you can be sure that they will become a reality. This too will be a messy process, but it is safe to see we will see non-Latin URLs in 2009.

Here are two articles that provide a good analysis of ICANN’s recent announcements: InformationWeek and CircleID.

If you’re curious about how the map came to be — as well as what areas of the world .me, .bv, and .aq refer to, you can listen to the interview here.

PS: Simon is based in .au.

IDNs are “internationalized domain names” — which basically means domains that use non-Latin characters. The Internet wasn’t exactly designed to support IDNs, particularly in URLs, but this is about to change in a big way.

China has historically been the most vocal advocate for IDNs, but now Russia is making noise as well. ICANN is in the process of testing IDNs right now and has stated that it wants to have a formal process in place for supporting them by the end of this year.

IDNs are the last major step toward creating a truly user-friendly Internet for people who don’t speak English and don’t use Latin characters — which is quite a few people on this planet. I would not be surprised to see both China and Russia not only embrace IDNs but require foreign companies to register them if they wish to do business in their countries.

The report finds that “19.2% of all Web sites ending in the .hk domain pose a security threat to Web users.” Last year, Tokelau ( .tk) was the most dangerous ccTLD, at 10.1 percent.

Here are the five most dangerous domains:

Hong Kong (.hk)
PR of China (.cn)
Philippines (.ph)
Romania (.ro)
Russia (.ru)

And here are the five safest domains:

Finland (.fi)
Japan (.jp)
Norway (.no)
Slovenia (.si)
Colombia (.co)

It’s interesting to note that Asia includes both the safest domains and the most dangerous domains.

And I wonder if this report will help spur governments and their registries to be more aggressive in policing their local Web sites.

Advertisement: Track all of the world’s ccTLDs with the Country Codes of the World map.

The reason for the sudden surge in registrations is Poland’s easing of the registration process by adding partner registries. There are now 95 registries for .pl including 37 of these based outside of Poland.

Here’s a chart of all countries with more than one million registrations. I also included the EU in there. I did not include Tuvalu (.tv).

I expect China to surpass Germany in the next two weeks.

For the ultimate country code reference, see the Country Codes of the World poster.

The topic is global navigation — why it’s so important and how to improve upon it. I wrote an ebook about this topic two years ago. Since then, geolocation and language negotiation have become more commonly used and an increasing number of companies have launched splash global gateways — like Intel, which launched its first splash gateway just last week.

If I have time, I also plan to talk about IDNs — internationalized domain names — and why companies will need to register them (and may in fact be required to register them).

See you on June 3rd!

And mark your calendars for June 3rd, when I will host a second webinar, also sponsored by Lionbridge, to discuss the many aspects of global navigation — from splash global gateways, to country codes, to geolocation. I’ll include lots of real-world examples.

And here is what I saw — a splash global gateway:

The splash gateway offers six languages: English, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and French.

And I enjoy the fact that the Vatican City has its own country code top-level domain: .va. In case you’re wondering, our Country Codes of the World poster includes the .va domain.

Check out out here: www.google.is/microsoft.

According to its Web site, the domain should be available for registration over the summer, with an initial Sunrise Period for trademark holders.

Based on some of the feedback I’m getting here, this could be a very popular domain. The squatters will certainly be first in line.

UPDATE: I just got word from Montenegro with dates for the registration process. They are as follows:

Sunrise Period
May 6-20, 2008
Open to all trademark owners and will have an auction process similar to dotAsia

Landrush Period
June 6-26, 2008
This period will also contain an auction for multiple applications

Open Registrations
July 17, 2008
Open to anyone on a first-come first-served basis.

After I created the Country Codes of the World map, I began looking at other platforms for the design. And since I own an iPhone, I couldn’t resist creating a custom wallpaper for it.

Here are two ccTLD wallpapers for the iPhone.

If you’d like to use one, simply save the image to your desktop and then import it to your iPhone via iPhoto or your PC images folder.

I’m using the black background currently.

I’m also working on a wallpaper for laptops and desktops. I’ll keep you posted…

Germany currently leads with roughly 11.5 million .de registrations, but China recently surpassed the 10 million mark, and is adding 20,000 registrations per day.

Keep in mind, this 10 million statistic includes all permutations of .cn, such as gov.cn and edu.cn. The .cn domain registered by companies inside and outside of China, such as Intel.cn and Google.cn, accounts for 6 million of the 10 million registrations.

It’s no surprise that China would surpass Germany. What is surprising is China’s rate of growth, as visualized here:

You can view the video clip here.

If the State Dept. had only referred to our Country Codes of the World map, this international incident would have been avoided. Andorra (.ad) is located in Europe, as shown below in this excerpt from the map: