There are a lot of excitement since ICANN has reveal the list of 1930 applications for new gTLD yesterday at an event in London yesterday.

Even some of the strongest opponents of the ICANN new gTLDs program have acknowledge the there is a case to open up new gTLD for Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs). So I am going to focus and analysis about the IDN applicants.

1) There are 116 applications for IDN , which is less than the 10% estimate I have prior. But what’s surprising is the numbers for Chinese new gTLDs, 73 applications¹.

The simple conclusion is that most people are still not certain of the future of IDN TLDs but if it is successful, it is likely to be in Chinese gTLDs.

2) The next two languages are 15 Arabic and 9 Japanese new gTLDs. But what is interesting is the lack of Korean, only 3 applications. Of the 3, only one comes from Korea (Samsung).

This is not to say Korean don’t use IDN as KISA has obtained “.한국” via IDN ccTLD Fast Track. What I learn is that the Korean government has discourage Korean companies to participate in new gTLD but to garner around .KR and .한국 for local usages.

Commercially, there is also less interest in domain names as Korean Internet market has predominately used to Keywords and Search Engine as the mean for navigation.

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