One of the big questions facing registries of existing top level domain names is how they should pursue Internationalized Domain Name equivalents of their domain names when they become available. These so-called IDN.IDN domain names will be available once new gTLDs, such as .nyc and .music come out.

    Last month we learned more about VeriSign's plans for .com and .net; today I reached out to Lance Wolak, Director of Marketing & Product Management for Public Interest Registry (PIR), which manages .org.

    "We're not primarily commercially driven in what we do," explained Wolak. "We're really driven to do what helps and protects the domain name registrant."

    When it comes to IDN top level domain names, PIR wants to show support for various communities.

    IDN.org domain names, with the standard .org at the end, have been available in many languages since the middle of the last decade. Wolak said that many of these have been registered for search engine optimization purposes (i.e., exact match to what the searcher types in his or her language/script).

    Wolak said it would be premature for PIR to give definite plans for .org-as-IDN domains, given that new TLD guidelines aren’t finalized yet.

    "Right now we are watching the information that’s coming out of ICANN, and looking over the Draft Applicant Guidebook," said Wolak. "Until that is finalized, we won't have a hundred percent picture of the requirements to launch a new gTLD, which would include IDN TLDs. So we don’t have anything to announce on how many scripts we'll go after, which ones, etc."

    Wolak noted that, in addition to Chinese script, Cyrillic and Arabic, PIR is looking at other popular scripts that have large populations behind them. Script tables are currently being developed for some scripts sets, including Arabic. PIR has been working with the community as it develops the tables. In addition to settling the tables, there are other issues for IDN TLDs that need to be worked out, such as current getting them to work with email systems.