I just left NIDA stealing some of the IP packets :-) While there, I bounced in Dongman Lee and Chanki Park. Park is an old friend who is currently the manager in charged of the .KR domain names registry and we have a brief chat about Korean domain names.
Apparently, they have over 80,000 thousand korean domain name registrations (wow! that’s more then the whole of .SG) but Park expect that the numbers will be going down in the next few months. The main reason cited was the lack of support of IDN in Internet Explorer, the pre-dominate browser in Korea.
Of course, there are plugins to IE to support IDN but nothing beats native support in the browser. In fact, IDN is already support in all the alternative browsers (Mozilla/Firebox/Conquerer/Opera/Safari) except IE. (Apple actually have a marketing campaign in Japan regarding the fact that Pathner nows supports IDN)
I am aware of friends in the Middle East to Asia (Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan..) who have organized numerous discussion with the Internet Explorer team (like Michel Suignard1) but none seem to be able to get Microsoft moving. *sigh*
Park suggested that I should pull together a meeting again with Microsoft. I hope the folks at the IEBlog are listening.
1 Don’t get me wrong..Michel is a good friend and I dont meant to embrass him here. But the reasonings for not supporting IDN is plausible 2 years ago but sound very silly now.
