Landrush Period of de-Domains with "ß" starts November 16th

Effective 16 November 2010, DENIC, will abolish the rule that forbids the Latin Small letter Sharp S to be used as an independent character in .de domain names. DENIC thus follows the revised standard for Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNAbis). Since 4 August 2010, the IDNAbis standard allows the Latin small letter sharp s – also known as "Eszett" or "sharp s" ("ß") – to be used as part of a domain name.

Since the new IDN standard does not provide for backwards compatibility to the preceding standard, it will not be possible to uniquely address domains containing the characters (character sets)"ss" or "ß", until all browsers support the new standard.

Not being able to unequivocally address a specific domain would adversely affect the users' confidence in the DNS. To guard against this, DENIC will apply a two-stage process for initial registration of domain names containing "ß". The official launch of the domains is preceded by a so-called sunrise period of three weeks, which has begun on 26 October 2010, 16:00 (CEST).

During this period, only those domain holders, in whose name domains containing the letter combination "ss" were registered at the decisive point in time of 26 October 2010, 15:00 (CEST) will have the opportunity to additionally register the corresponding ß-domain in their name.

The landrush period starts at November 16 2010. Anybody can register any free de-domain with "ß".

Hans-Peter Oswald
http://www.domainregistry.de/...