IDNs vs ASCII Domain Name Brand Protection

One thing that I see all the time lately is a company that has an older web 1.0 domain name like companname-fr.com or companyname.fr and yet, they fail to realize that the IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) version of their brand is still unregistered or even worse, it’s owned by someone else. IDNs are growing even more important for businesses, it’s really Local Search of Steroids, you have a person that speaks a certain language, searching from a certain location, and they already have certain expectations about the content that they find when they access the website. IE. if someone in Russia types in школы.com, they would expect to find information about “schools” in Russian.

I came across a thread at IDNforums that discussed this a little but, (it was actually about using “articles” like “EL or “L” in french names, but you’ll see where I am going here…

There are a few examples given where “articles’ are used in French domain names:
lemonde.fr
l-hotel.com
delamour.com

I want to take a closer look at l-hotel.com. This company does have a real usage for this domain as, l’hotel means “the hotel” in French, however this company, L’Hôtel, a large world-wide brand, fails to protect their brand from an IDN standpoint. Hence, take a look at L’Hôtel.com

– Now, if you’re IDN savvy, you’ll realize that the this domain is actually different, when it’s converted to Puny Code, www.xn--lhtel-7ta3296c.com. But the concept remains, if L’Hôtel really wanted to protect their brand, then they need to pay attention to the IDN version of their domain name.

Hotels.com
I will show you another example, and I’ll keep it very simple, but you’ll see that there are many more possible combinations than I use in the example.

Hotels.com owns hotels.fr - But, Do they own; hôtels.com (hotels in French) or hôtels.fr NOPE!

This will be a challenge for companies in the future, as they not only need to protect their brands from a .com perspective, but, in all CCTLDs and in close to 200 different languages. In many cases there may be several companies that can claim rights to the IDN version of a domain name and to a ccTLD version or a combo of the 2. Especially with generic words like “hotel.”