Spanish Names Now Available In .INFO

January 22, 2008; 07:16 AM
Dublin, Ireland-January 21, 2008--Afilias, a global provider of registry services, announced today that Internet users can now register .INFO domain names that include the Spanish characters б, й, н, с, у, ъ, and ь. The introduction of these new domain names, termed Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), now enables Spanish-speakers to establish Web sites using words commonly used in Spanish such as pelнcula.info, telйfono-mуvil.info, Нdolo.info, Piсata.info, and others.

“With over 100 million Spanish-speaking Internet users today, 13 million of which are in the United States alone(1) , we believe that the introduction of Spanish IDNs represents an important addition for .INFO and for the growing base of Spanish-speaking users on the Internet,” said Roland LaPlante, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for Afilias. “As the only truly global Internet extension, .INFO Web sites are a natural way for individuals, organizations, and institutions to convey information in their local, native Spanish language.”

This set of Spanish characters adds to Afilias’ broad support of IDNs, bringing the total number of languages supported to ten. These include scripts(2) for Spanish (ES), German (DE), Polish (PL), Swedish (SV), Danish (DA), Hungarian (HU), Icelandic (IS), Latvian (LV), Lithuanian (LT), and Korean (KO).

Afilias’ IDN registrations are based on a technical standard called Punycode that was approved in 2003. .INFO was the first generic domain to automatically accept standards-compliant registrations in 2004 and IDN adoption has slowly grown since all common Web browsers including Mozilla, Opera, Firefox, and Internet Explorer 7 now allow users to natively type in IDN addresses and access these Web sites.

Those interested in registering .INFO IDN names should contact an ICANN-accredited and Afilias-authorized registrar of their choice. Registrars that plan to immediately offer Spanish .INFO domains include:

007names, Inc

AB NameISP

COMALIS

Corporation Service Company (CSC)

DomainSite.com

Dynadot

Galcomm.com

GKG.NET, INC
GoDaddy.com

Interdomain

Internet.bs Corp

InterNetX GmbH

Key-Systems GmbH

Name.com

Names Beyond

Secura GmbH

About Afilias
Afilias provides global registry services that leverage proven technology to deliver fast, reliable and secure service. Afilias’ technology supports a wide range of applications, including Internet domain registries such as .INFO, .ORG, .aero, .mobi, .asia, and many country code domains. Afilias also provides services in the RFID market with its Afilias Discovery Service, which enables real-time lookup of event histories across RFID networks. Afilias maintains international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland, sales offices in London, England, sales and operational facilities in Toronto, administrative offices in the U.S. near Philadelphia, PA, and operational offices in New Delhi, India. For more information please visit http://www.afilias.info.

1. According to researched published by Internet World Stats at http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats10.htm

2. The term “script” refers only to the conversion of specific non-ASCII characters to ASCII-based strings that will be registered as domain names.

Source: www.hispanicprwire.com