[co-author: Laetitia Arrault]

doMEn d.o.o., the Registry for the .ME country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD), has recently announced that it would soon allow the registration of Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) under .ME.

IDNs are domain names that contain at least one non-ASCII character – for example, a character with diacritics like é, ü, ñ, or a Chinese character like 飛.

Registering IDNs is already possible in many ccTLDs such as Belgium (.BE), Brazil (.BR), China (.CN), Hong Kong (.HK), France (.FR), Germany (.DE), Greece (.GR), Hungary (.HU), Spain (.ES) or Tuvalu (.tv), and in most generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs).

The .ME Registry is planning to launch IDN registrations on 12 November 2018, allowing characters from the following languages: Arabic, Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Danish, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Hindi, Hungarian, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Montenegrin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian.

The .ME ccTLD was launched in 2008 and has proven quite popular since then.  By 2010, over 320,000 .ME domain names had already been registered, which made it the fastest selling debut TLD.  At the time of writing, according to DomainTools, the ccTLD counts over 892,500 registered domain names.  The launch of .ME IDNs will undoubtedly raise this number.

This post is selected from our Anchovy News publication: Anchovy® is our comprehensive and centralised online brand protection service for global domain name strategy, including new gTLDs together with portfolio management and global enforcement using a unique and exclusive online platform developed in-house.

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