IDN History

[blastfromthepast]

History removed.

[idnowner]

• 2007. DNJournal announces first $1 Million IDN sale

[idnceo]

you know which one was the first day to register idns? it was November 09, 2000? im guessing because i know some of the premium domains were registered that day. Or some idns were registered before that date? That year i was living in New Zealand, why i was not taking IDNs those days?!!!!!!

November 09, 2000? First day of the IDN era?

[Drewbert]

You missed ra-- which begat bq--

[idnowner]

Originally Posted by idnceo

you know which one was the first day to register idns? it was November 09, 2000? im guessing because i know some of the premium domains were registered that day. Or some idns were registered before that date? That year i was living in New Zealand, why i was not taking IDNs those days?!!!!!!

November 09, 2000? First day of the IDN era?

It was November 9 or 10, 2000, depending on where on earth you were at the time registrations were opened. In the US, it was Nov. 10. Any IDNs you see registered before Nov. 9, 2000, were registered as "ASCII" domains by people who had "insider" information - I'm guessing a racecode encoder/decoder application provided to registrars in Late October 2000.

Some people today still hold the old race code domains. For example: bq--3b7y4xarlfzq.com (美少女.com / "beauty girl") resolves to a PPC page - the domain was registered October 31, 2000 (by a sneaky person in Baltimore, Maryland, I might add). When migration of bq-- to xn-- took place, those that had pre-Nov-09 registrations were left holding garbage. Perhaps the owner of that domain still thinks he has something of value? The punycode version of the same domain (xn--vust4dy24c.com) was registered in July 2005 by Homepage Center in Japan.