New .ink & .wiki IDNs Available
ICANN has approved .ink and .wiki’s requests for additional International Domain Name (IDN) capability!
IDNs allow registrants to use non-ACSII characters in their domain names, making the naming process more intuitive and convenient for non-English speakers. In this way, IDNs are a step toward further Internet globalization and accessibility.
Top Level Design is excited to offer domain names in languages such as Arabic, Thai, Japanese, Korean, Lao, and Hebrew in both our .wiki and .ink TLDs! Registrants will also be able to register names using Cyrillic, Greek, and Latin scripts.
Sunrise Opens & Corporate Wiki Strategies
Yesterday marked the opening of .wiki’s 60 day Sunrise period! What this means is that we will be open exclusively to trademarks registered in ICANN’s Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH) until May 5th. This is required of ALL new TLD registries, but given that wikis are already deployed across companies of all sizes, it makes sense to not only celebrate this as a milestone on the path to .wiki’s General Availability (on May 26th), but to talk about the benefits of a corporate wiki.
Ready, Set… Launch!
Over the past weeks we’ve put together this site to introduce future registrants, registrar partners, and Internet users to our mission with .wiki and give shape to our launch plans. Those of us involved in the New gTLD program and the ICANN process know that we continue to have to adapt quickly to timeline changes and other obstacles but we also know that we have come miles from the initial policy development, the application window, and now have every remaining step in view. In July, we will be attending ICANN’s next meeting in Durban, South Africa, which is widely understood to be the last ICANN meeting before new TLDs start being approved and implemented into the root zone. From there our team will head on to WikiSym and WikiMania, the largest wiki symposium and wiki centric conference in the world, which are to be held back to back in Hong Kong this August. We expect to start our launch phases soon thereafter, and these phases will help focus the wider public’s attention on the new possibilities with a .wiki domain.
We’ve taken a look at all the applications ahead of .wiki in the ICANN implementation queue, and once you take out the IDNs, the brand TLDs, and the TLDs with contention, .wiki seems to be the 7th new TLD that will be approved and implemented in the root zone, and it is arguably the most generic and widely understood new TLD in the first 50 English TLDs to be introduced. We can’t be more excited! We are thankful for the luck that resulted in us getting .wiki uncontested and one of the earliest priority draw numbers that ordered all 1,917 applications; and now it is up to us to make the most of the opportunity that has been given to us. Please, get in touch with us if you are a wiki enthusiast and are already excited about sharing your plans for your .wiki domain; if you are a registrar and want to offer .wiki domains; or if you just want to learn more about new TLDs and why .wiki will be one of the most important banners under which the public learns about and experiences TLD expansion. Also, be sure to keep an eye on this space as we confirm the launch schedule for .wiki and prepare for the TLD expansion coming this fall.