CircleID

While otherwise great, this article has a significant technical error. It says "you can’t at present search for anything except an exact match”. That is plainly incorrect. You cannot search the untranslated zone file for an exact match, but as the article shows in the next paragraph, there is a single unambiguous way to convert every IDN name to its Unicode equivalent. If you want to search for "plurals, misspellings, instances of your mark contained in longer names” and so on, you simply convert all the names in the zone to their Unicode equivalents and search the converted list. People have been doing this since the first day that IDNs were introduced into any of the TLDs.

I'll take the "otherwise great" with a huge grin, coming from someone who really does know this area. 

I don't know of anyone who's offering this service to the public, though I suspect it won't be long in coming.  But that only works if you can get the zone file, which is possible in .com and some others TLDs, but in many cases zone files are inaccessible, even in otherwise reasonable countries such as Canada and Ireland.

>I don’t know of anyone who’s offering this service to the public, though I suspect it won’t be long in coming.

That would probably depend on whether the agreement with the zone owner even allows publishing that information.

>But that only works if you can get the zone file, which is possible in .com and some others TLDs, but in many cases zone files are inaccessible, even in otherwise reasonable countries such as Canada and Ireland.

Sure, but then you have the same problem with IDNs as you do with all-ASCII names. You can't search a zone for plurals, near-matches, and so on without access to the zone file. The presence or absence of IDNs doesn't affect that. In other words, please don't make this sound like an IDN-specific issue: it isn't.

What I meant by "offering this service" was a public interface to search IDNs—in other words, someone with access to a zone (e.g., .com), who encoded (decoded?) the ASCII equivalents and made them searchable via the Web.

I agree, the problem of searching inaccessible zones for IDNs is no different than searching for non-IDNs, except insofar as the language itself made a difference.

Practically speaking, solutions for non-IDN English word searches exist already. Mark Kudlacik at CheckMark put together a system that spun out likely variants of a word, then one-by-one determined if those existed in the otherwise-inaccessible zone (you can always find out if one particular domain name exists).  However, that was English-specific, built on rules for pluralizing, likely misspellings, etc. in the English language.  I don't know if such rule sets exist for other languages.  If they did, they could be applied to native-character IDNs.

While no-one is making much money yet, people are stocking up and waiting for the “explosion.” There’s a lot of activity recently with regard to IDNs:

Thank you for the mention Anthony I'm the owner of IDN Forums & want to say that this info is a bit incorrect. It is not easily seen but the site has been up for a little bit more than 4 months but sales are steadily happening since January.
Most of the sales are still kept private by request but from what I personally know has sold from a few close members & myself it is already in the low XX,XXX range.
I assume buyers do not want it public yet that they are investing in premium IDN domains yet.

Excellent article.

In addition to the trademark and technical challenges, don't forget that this whole thing falls apart without proper language and variant tables.  It took the CDNC 2+ years to wrap up the first guidelines and tables that allowed registrations in the Chinese, Japanese & Korean scripts (CJK) which share some common parts of the alphabet.

-Ram