PRAGUE, 20 May – Www.úřadpráce.cz – this is what the Czech domains might look like in future. Such names would be enabled by implementation of the IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) system, which would facilitate working Internet domains containing characters from national alphabets. In addition to greater freedom in selecting address names, IDN brings several arguable issues. The CZ.NIC association, administrator of the .CZ top-level Internet domain, is therefore launching the website www.háčkyčárky.cz to provide information about IDN and support the discussion among the Czech Internet users on whether IDN should be implemented in the Czech Internet or not.

On the technical level, the CZ.NIC association is ready for potential IDN implementation. However, the implementation will not be performed unless there is a major interest in this implementation within the user community.

”Surveys carried out by the Markent agency in 2004 and 2006 indicate that there is not much interest in the addition of diacritics to domain names. Only 22 % organizations responded positively. We are planning another survey for this year – and will provide information on the results obtained,” stated Ondřej Filip, Managing Director at CZ.NIC.

Such acceptance of IDN is partly due to a number of possible issues that the system implementation might cause, such as:

• Development of the “typo domains”, i.e. domains taking advantage of the typos users make when entering Internet addresses. Users are facing the risk of harmful content, software attacks etc. IDN would be yet another reason for the typo domains to proliferate.
• Communication barrier; IDN assumes that even members of different countries have some knowledge of a national alphabet and spelling and the respective alphabet is installed in their computer.
  
  
  
• Legal issues; Registration of domain names containing characters from national alphabets could increase the number of domain name disputes – e.g. due to domain name conflicts with trademarks and geographic names.
  

These are some of the difficulties that the IDN implementation in the Czech Internet could cause. However, there are solution proposals as well. IDN is already operational in several European countries. Both system perspectives will therefore be introduced by the CZ.NIC project named www.háčkyčárky.cz. In addition to various information on IDN in the .CZ domain the website will give users the opportunity to check how many versions with diacritics can exist for an existing or hypothetical domain name.