- Part 3: IDNs (Internationalized Domain Names)
IDNs (Internationalized Domain Names)
Internationalized domain names, which are known in the domain name world as IDNs, are names that contain non-ASCII characters. Look at your standard English keyboard—the characters that aren’t on there aren’t ASCII. For example, Chinese or Arabic characters qualify as non-ASCII characters.
Since most of the world use standard ASCII, why would anyone want to purchase such a name? Basically, your IDN will be encoded to work with the standard keyboard. This encoding begins with xn-- and displays the changed letters as different suffixes. Confused? That’s ok. It’s a touchy subject. Let me give you an example.
A popular website is www.paypal.com. Now, say you change the first “a” in paypal to be the Cyrillic letter “a.” You could still advertise that you were selling www.paypal.com, but the real domain name, once it is encoded to meet ASCII standards, would be www.xn--pypal-4ve.com —the “xn,” two dashes, the website name minus the changed letters, one dash, and the code for the changed letter.
Basically, a few rotten eggs ruined the whole dozen. Because of scammers, IDNs have notorious connotations. Scammers prey on new domain name entrepreneurs who don’t read the fine print. Do not fall into this trap!
However, you can also make a lot of money with IDNs. Why? You can still find generics for reasonable prices! Sure, you won’t have quite as much traffic as the English version, but imagine what you could do with www.onlinedating.com if you changed all of those letters to Chinese characters.
A good rule of thumb is to always be honest and to protect yourself. If you are selling an IDN, make sure that this is explained to potential buyers carefully. If you are buying a domain name that seems too good to be true, copy and paste it into a word processing program to make sure it isn’t an IDN. Remember to play around with fonts. When you think you are buying www.lotto.com, you might actually be buying www.lott0.com, with the number zero as the last character. Be careful.
