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IDN Success in Italy

News 16-07-2012

Starting on 11 July dot .it domains got their accents and also started speaking French and German. Nearly eight thousand IDNs (Internationalized Domain Names) were registered in just four hours - an incredible success! In the first five minutes 19,000 requests were handled, which led to the registration of 1,737 names, allocated on a "first come first served" basis. The growth has been exponential right from the start: after 30 minutes 2,620 domains had already been registered, and after an hour 3,000 domains (with a total of 92,362 requests received).

The first dot it IDN name - perché.it - was registered after just 3 seconds, then 5 seconds later perchè.it - i.e with the accent the other way round, and thus incorrect, was also registered. The second name to be registered was più.it, followed by casinò.it . Among the first hundred names were the most common words like papà, caffè and società, but also words that in normal written Italian don’t actually have accents - agentì, pizzà and ìtalià. And then there are the city or country names written in the original language e.g. österreich.it and köln.it.

The numbers speak for themselves, but this is only the beginning: with the extended character set it is now possible to register not just new names with accents, but also the corresponding translations into, for example French and German, of names already registered in Italian (for example, ragazzo.it can become garçon.it, or strasburgo.it can become straßburg.it). 

The Italian Registry’s system worked to perfection, supporting the enormous number of requests received.

The success was made possible by the introduction of the synchronous registration system in September 2009 that allows the management of a large number of registrations in real time.

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