The Domain World seen by ItalianDragon

Ladies and Gentleman,

 yestarday without too much noise , something was happening in the domain industry and no it was not any auction, but rather an IDN landrush :  the Spanish IDN on .info domains.

This was the news as reported by Dynadot (one of the leading IDN Registrars):

Spanish INFO IDN Launch

Jan 18, 2008On Jan 19, 2008 the central registry for INFO domains will be launching support for Spanish IDNs. Spanish is the second most spoken language in the world, after Chinese (English is third). INFO is one of the most well recognized and established top level domains in the world.LAUNCH INDICATORSpanish INFO IDNs are scheduled to go live sometime at 19:00 UTC, on January 19th. We have created a “Realtime Launch Indicator” so you know exactly when the launch occurs. The indicator checks real-time with the central registry, and displays either “Not Launched Yet” or “Launched”. You can see the indicator on our home page, or on the IDN search pages:http://www.dynadot.com
http://www.dynadot.com/domain/search2.html
http://www.dynadot.com/domain/bulk2.html

There are two ways to get your Spanish INFO IDN with Dynadot. Before the launch, you can place a pre-order. After the launch, you can place a regular order.

OPTION 1: PRE-ORDERS (orders placed before the launch)Dynadot is currently taking pre-orders for Spanish INFO IDNs. The price is $8.99 per year. Any orders for Spanish INFO IDN domains placed before the launch are pre-orders.Your order will remain in the processing queue until January 19th. Our system will automatically try to grab your pre-orders as soon as Spanish INFO IDNs go live. Please note these conditions:

• There will be several registrars trying to get the top Spanish INFO IDNs. We cannot guarantee that we get your requested domain.
• There may be more than one customer trying to pre-order the same domain as you. If Dynadot gets the domain, it will be randomly assigned to one of the pre-orders. For example, if there are 10 pre-orders for a domain, each pre-order will have a 1 in 10 chance of getting the domain.
• Because the central registry is not accepting the Spanish language tag yet, we always return “available” for Spanish INFO IDN searches. However, there are some Spanish words that have already been registered using other language tags. Several of the accented characters in Spanish also exist in other languages. So please check that your domain has not been registered using another language tag.
• Because the central registry is not accepting the Spanish language tag yet, variant and char-set errors cannot be detected. If we get a variant or char-set error, then your pre-order will fail. Please make sure you follow the rules of the Spanish Policy Form to avoid these errors.
• There is a huge upsurge in traffic and activity on our website during product launches. If there is a technical difficulty we may not be able to fulfill your pre-order.
• If for any of the above reasons we cannot fulfill your preorder, you will receive a Dynadot account credit. Sorry, we cannot provide refunds on failed pre-orders.

OPTION 2: REGULAR ORDERS (orders placed after the launch)If you wait until after the launch is live, any Spanish INFO IDN orders you place will be handled by our regular order system. The price for a Spanish INFO IDN is $8.99.The advantage of placing a Spanish INFO IDN order after the launch is that searches will return false if a domain is already taken. Also, most variant and char-set errors will be checked for by the central registry.

We have recently added a fast checkout. To use the fast checkout, you first have to prepay your account. Then you have to sign into your account. Now the search page will have a “Add and Checkout” button. You can skip the account signin and payment pages in the checkout process.http://www.dynadot.com/company/prepay.html
http://www.dynadot.com/resource/forums/f6-engineering-corner/fast-checkout-282.html DOMAINS LOCKEDAll Spanish INFO IDNs registered in the first month after launch will be registry locked for 30 days after their registration date. The contact info for the domains will be Dynadot, LLC. The name servers will not be set. Any successful registrations will appear in your account however.Well….despite having to be up all night to be able to be there at 7 PM UTC (it was 5.30 am in my time!) , once few minutes were left , Dynadot started to have some problems , but still every 30 seconds or so I was able to refresh and hit the mouse button again ……nothing , till  7 PM , it keps showing “NOT LAUNCHED YET”.

Some more seconds….and there you go: LAUNCHED  !!!

Not even a breath away but the 2 most precious name I was after were already taken!!

To be honest I was not surprised….my poor little computer would not beat the monster machines of the dropcatchers…..but I was curious to see who catched españa.info and español.info so…..with my big surprise this is what I read in the whois:

Domain ID:D23382878-LRMS
Domain Name:XN–ESPAA-RTA.INFO
Created On:19-Jan-2008 18:35:06 UTC
Expiration Date:19-Jan-2009 18:35:06 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:Gal Communications Ltd. (R111-LRMS)

Domain ID:D23388163-LRMS
Domain Name:XN–ESPAOL-ZWA.INFO
Created On:19-Jan-2008 18:54:38 UTC
Expiration Date:19-Jan-2009 18:54:38 UTC

How is it possible that those 2 domains have been registered BEFORE the starting time (19.00.00 UTC) ???

I would be delighted to hear any help in this matter from anyone.