Do you fancy a café.eu? EURid has finally decided to launch Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) for .EU domains on Dec. 10. IDN are domains containing other characters than a-z or 0-9.
This is exciting news for companies and individuals worldwide which until now have had to settle for a "translated"
IDN domains will be available in all twenty-three official EU languages on a first-come first-served basis (Landrush) from 10 December 2009. As the landrush is open for all, and as there will be no special rights period, expect to see a lot of work for IP lawyers in 2010. Registrants should already now contact their domain registrars to queue up for .eu IDN domains, as there will only be one winner for each domain name. Registrars like European Domain Centre, EuroDNS, Godaddy etc. will offer a waiting list for .eu IDN domains.
Characters from different scripts/alphabets cannot be mixed. Domains must use characters from a single (1) script only. For instance you cannot mix ó from Latin with Î from the Greek alphabet in the same domain. The supported characters list can be found at Eurid´s website, where you can see the different sections for the characters of Latin, Greek and Cyrillic.
