New: info-domains with special characters

COLOGNE, Germany- September 21, 2003. ICANN Registrar Secura announces today, that the company is accepting for free pre-registrations of info-domains with special characters(https://www.domainregistry.de/info.html) .Afilias, the registry of info-domains, has declared now, that it will introduce info-domains with special characters in the 4th quarter of 2003.

Cologne, Germany (PRWEB) September 21, 2003 --Afilias is introducing info-domain names with "Umlaute" like "ä", "ü" and "ö" special for the German market. These special characters are also used in many languages, e.g. scandinavian, turkish etc. and are therefore of interest for a great part of the non-anglo-saxon world.

Afilias announced that it will be the first generic top level registry to implement an ICANN-standards compliant internationalized domain name (IDN) solution with the launch of its first IDN product for .INFO. By the end of the fourth quarter of 2003,Afilias will open registration of .INFO names using the German script umlaut characters: ä," ö," and ü."
This is an important step in the evolution of the Internet as a true global medium for communication. .INFOs success in Germany has been extraordinary and illustrates the demand for domain names that have international meaning," said Philipp Grabensee, Chairman of Afilias
Board of Directors located in Düsseldorf, Germany. We believe that German script registration will be popular given that .INFO has over a quarter of a million .INFO domains already registered in Germany, with at least 10% of those containing the letter combinations ae, oe, and ue, which are the widely use of alternatives to registering an umlaut character on the Web."

Afilias has worked closely with the Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim (The German Language Institute in Mannheim, Germany) in developing an appropriate solution to address the needs of registrants in Germany and surrounding areas. Based on the advice of the Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Afilias will introduce its first IDN solution to address the common use of umlaut characters.
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