[Rubber Duck]

Originally Posted by markits

Type-in traffic usually happens to .com domains in China. You can speculate on few .cns but do not expect any type-ins.
Again, com is the king in China.

Yes, this flies in total contradiction to the views and expectations of the wider industry. They all assume that .cn and .jp are the natural market leaders, but this is a total fallicy and always has been. My investment decision were steared from an early time by the differences in traffic between dot Coms and dot CN for the same keywords, even though the sample used was small.

It matters not whether what happens with IDN.IDN, the dot Com registry is always going to be top dog, and the form used is highly likely to be the ASCII form. This may seem odd, but it should not really come as a surprise. Dot Com is a global megabrand. The Japanese and to a lesser extent the Chinese have alway naturally mixed ASCII strings into their language, where they are readily identifiable by all. I think Verisign will Alias to dot com in both these languages, but I doubt if these aliases will be greatly used in the short-term.