IDNs for Dummies
Okay, so you’re an IDN believer — good for you. But can someone explain to me why someone would register (nevermind bid!) on a domain like credìtcard.com? I speak French myself, so I can understand why some people see value in domains which use different character sets if they have meaning. If I had to assign a value to a domain such as the one I mentioned above, it’d honestly be a negative value — not only does the domain have no value, however it’s going to send one hell of a lot of typo traffic to creditcards.com and confuse the heck out of any saavy computer users who notices the difference but hasn’t a clue how to enter said character on a keyboard.
Am I wrong? You can go place a bid on Sedo if you think I am — it’s at 60 pounds with 3+ days to go. Two bidders… I really hope we don’t end up with a bidding war. I could understand this back in the days when Sedo didn’t announce such domains were IDNs and so a few domainers mistakenly took them for generics, however it has a big blue IDN button right by the listing and goes on to explain what you’re actually buying…
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July 2nd, 2009 at 1:13 am
Believe me, when IDN investors (of REAL IDN’s) see these auctions come up at SEDO, we let out a collective groan.
SEDO, unfortunately, let’s these phishing domains (domains that have no real meaning outside the English language and use extended characters where they normally wouldn’t be) through to go to auction.
If you look at the closing auctions at SEDO you will see some real IDN’s there (2 German .de’s a German .com, a German.net and a Turkish .net that’s at $nnnn already).
Hopefully one day SEDO will finally hire some staff capable of migrating their database and software to UTF-8 encoding so they can auction off more than just extended-Latin IDN’s.
July 2nd, 2009 at 1:35 am
Hi Drew,
Thanks for stopping by. That’s a great point you made about the phishing — that never crossed my mind however many domains of this “generic knock-off” nature would certainly make great domains for phishing.
And yeah - completely agree with you about real IDNs.