As already advanced by TeK in July, FCCN will start selling domain names with Portuguese characters, thus allowing to register dialing or addresses with accented characters. This was a possibility that was already being studied by the Foundation and from 1 January it will start to operate.
Interested parties will thus be able to register domain names where accents and cedilhados enter, such as www.omeubebĂ©.pt or www.a-minha-LĂngua-Ă©-o-portuguĂŞs.pt, with the domain registration price remaining the same as that practiced for registration without Portuguese characters.
To avoid problems with duplicating registrations with known names that are already used without the Portuguese characters, the FCCN has reserved a period of six months during which only registrants of addresses with accented characters can hold the holders of the same domain. Thus, the owners of the address www.omeubebe.pt will be able to register the domain www.omeubebé.pt, paying a new registration.
After July 1, 2005, all interested parties will be able to make new registrations with the special characters of the Portuguese language, thus expanding the diversity of Internet addresses and maintaining their loyalty to the Portuguese language.
Registrations in the .com.pt domain – which traditionally enjoy more flexible rules – will only be able to start registering with special characters from 1 July 2005.
The FCCN explains in a statement that it hopes with this change to be able to improve the browsing experience for Portuguese-speaking users, while also maintaining linguistic diversity and the integrity of the brands and identity of Portuguese companies.
The expansion of the number of basic characters available for the registration of internet addresses has been an option of several countries all over the world, trying to surpass the limits imposed by the initial adoption of the English language.
However, there are some problems, since for users to access pages with addresses that use a wide set of characters, plug-in to browser, or who use Mozilla that already has that functionality integrated. For now the plug-in Verisign’s DNS-i is the most stable but it is expected that more entities will emerge to guarantee this functionality.
Related News:
2004-04-28 – Domain names will gain Portuguese characters later this year
