åäö in .com domain

Question

Is ÅÄÖ allowed in .com domain? it is allowed in swedish .se top level domain. ie kåtbock.se which means hornygoat. According to to swedish internet magazine you can use ÅÄÖ in .com domain, but you cannot register ÅÄÖ in godaddy registar

Answer 1

It's possible to use Unicode characters outside the allowed range of characters for domain names by using the following type of encoding: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3492.txt. This works with .com names because it encodes the unicode names using the allowed characters.

For example, if I use the "go to" feature in my browser to go to the domain you suggest, I actually land on

http://xn--ktbock-iua.se/

There's no reason you can't register

http://xn--ktbock-iua.com/

since all of the characters in the name are allowed ones.

Answer 2

You could register such a domain: the .com registrar allows it, but be aware that in many browsers (Opera and Firefox, at least) the PUNYCODE version of the domain (that's the unreadable version beginning with xn--) will display in the address bar instead of the nice, readable Unicode version.

There's a good reason for that. IDNs (Internationalised Domain Names) allow all sorts of characters, which allows for easy spoofing. The domain name www.pаypal.com, for example, contains the Cyrillic character а, which looks identical, in most fonts, to the Latin a. That's dangerous. The .se registrar would not allow this domain to be registered: it has strict policies on what characters are allowed. Therefore browsers trust the .se registrar and allow IDNs in .se. Browesers don't trust the .com registrar, and disalow IDNs in .com. People could still type in the IDN, and it would work, but it would display in the address bar in its PUNYCODE form.

You might want to try the .info registrar. They have strict policies, and Opera and Firefox allow IDNs in .info.

Other browsers behave differently. Your domain name should display fine in Safari, whichever registrar you choose. Safari disables Greek, Cyrillic, and Cherokee scripts, but allows extended Latin. Internet Explorer's behaviour depends on the user's settings.

More information can be found in an article I wrote: Internationalised Domain Names - Bringing the World to the Web.

Answer 3

You are allowed, but id recommend against it. The reason being is that english and the english latin alphabet are still the highest precentage of internet users, followed by chinese.

A good case study would be Kontake.ru. They use English languaes and have even registered a two letter domaian VT.com to point to their website.