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As part of its ongoing efforts to improve the Internet and ensure access for users worldwide, Public Interest Registry (PIR), the .ORG registry, will make available Spanish Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) on 03 March 2007.

The Domain Name System originally was limited largely to the characters used in English and the ASCII character set. Technical standards will now enable the registration of Spanish IDNs that use specific characters (e.g., á, é, í, ñ, ó). These characters are created using Punycode, a simple and efficient way to translate non-ASCII characters into a string of characters allowed in host name labels (ASCII letters, digits and hyphens) and back again.

Spanish .ORG IDN registrations will be handled on a first-come, first-served basis. Spanish IDNs registered during the first 30 days of operation — specifically between 19:00 UTC, 03 March 2007 and 19:00 UTC, 02 April 2007 — will be placed on Server Delete Prohibited, Server Transfer Prohibited, Server Update Prohibited, Server Renew Prohibited and Server Hold. These statuses will remain in effect until 02 May 2007 to allow intellectual property interests to file dispute resolution actions, if warranted.

"With more than 100 million Spanish-speaking Internet users in Latin America, enabling IDNs in Spanish will bring .ORG and the power of the Internet to a significant population, especially to the civil sector, that may not have had adequate access before," says Erick Iriarte Ahon, director of Alfa-Redi and a .ORG Advisory Council member. In addition to Spanish IDNs, PIR allows IDN registrations in several other scripts, including Danish, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Korean (Hangul), Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish and Swedish.

See PIR's Web site for more information on IDNs and to see the list of .ORG registrars that offer IDN registration.

The latest copy of Public Interest Registry's (PIR) newsletter, "The World of .ORG" and free subscription form is available online.

About PIR

Trusted across all ages, backgrounds and nationalities, .ORG is where people turn to find credible information, get involved, fund causes and support advocacy. .ORG, The Public Interest Registry empowers the global noncommercial community to use the Internet more effectively and, concurrently, takes a leadership position among Internet stakeholders on policy and related issues on behalf of the .ORG Community. (Learn More)

Related topics: DNS, Domain Names, Registry Services, Multilinguism, Top-Level Domains