David C. Hill writes on Legal Blawg.com that in the past, the lettering in domain names was limited to alphanumeric characters (that is, English-based ASCII characters). This created an access barrier to internet users who only understood Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, or other alphabets which could not be incorporated into domain names. International Domain Names (IDNs) seek to resolve this problem and ICANN is hard at work to introduce IDNs. The goal is to further internationalize the web and increase both accessibility and efficiency.

Introducing IDNs raises a number of serious legal issues for those who currently hold domain name trademarks to protect their branding and since there is not an effective international regulatory body governing the internet it will be difficult to enforce international IDN trademark violations at the IDN level.

We will contact ICANN and discuss this topic with them as the subject for an upcoming article here on DomainNews. In the meantime, you can read David Hill's full post here.

Source: Legal Blawg.com Post by David C. Hill - May 8th, 2008