IDNs Issues

Hello!!! In the next two posts we will speak about issues concerned with Internationalized Domain Names.

No one can deny the fact, that IDNs are very useful in modern world. They allow millions of people to get access to the information and knowledge available online. Much of the world's population today does not use, or even recognize, Latin characters, so, multilingual domain names are very helpful for them.

But, nevertheless, there are some problems concerning Internationalized Domain Names. Among them are the follows:

· Technical Issues

There are substantial technical issues surrounding the introduction of IDNs, many of which are quite complex. Allmost all browsers have problems with opening sites which use non-Latin characters in their URLs. But, the technical community is working toward the resolution or this problem.

· Intellectual Property Issues

The possibility for confusion among domain names raises several intellectual property issues. Several languages contain strings of characters that have equivalent or near-equivalent meanings. Use of such character strings in IDNs might lead to domain names that are similar phonetically, visually or across various character tables.

Traditional domain names use classification of goods and services which allows different trademarks and brands to make use of similar or identical URLs. But this is not the case with respect to IDNs where there is no classification of domain names. For non-Latin web addresses to work efficiently in the future, a sufficient global work, directed to the solving of this problem, is needed.

To be continued in the next post…….