Czech Republic: Czechs Say No To Internationalised Domain Names, Again

CZ.NIC, the Registry for the .CZ country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD), recently published the results of a survey that indicate that Czechs have once again rejected the possibility of registering Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) under .CZ.

IDNs are domain names that contain at least one non-ASCII character – for example, a character with diacritics like é, ü, ñ, or a Chinese character like 飛. Registering IDNs is already possible in many ccTLDs such as Belgium (.BE), Brazil (.BR), China (.CN), Hong Kong (.HK), France (.FR), Germany (.DE), Greece (.GR), Hungary (.HU), Spain (.ES) or Tuvalu (.tv), and in most generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs).

According to the published survey results, 88% of corporate respondents and 64% of ordinary Internet users were either strongly opposed, or would rather that IDNs under .CZ not be introduced. The survey was undertaken during the autumn of 2019 and 1,015 representatives of organisations and 1,206 individual Internet users took part.

The above figures represent a 2% increase in resistance to IDNs among corporate respondents and a 9% increase among ordinary Internet users when compared to the last survey in 2016. Moreover, this is the seventh time that CZ.NIC has undertaken a survey concerning the introduction of IDNs under .CZ and the seventh time that those surveyed have expressed their opposition to their introduction.

The CEO of CZ.NIC, Ondřej Filip, has stated in connection with the latest survey that:

"The repeated rejection of IDN in the .CZ domain zone is not surprising. Among other things, the survey also showed that for Internet users, IDN is not a desirable feature or a priority. The respondents stated that topics of Internet security, online protection or the availability of a quality Internet connection were more important to them."

According to CZ.NIC, users who participated in the survey view the current situation with .CZ as satisfactory and, in turn, view the use of diacritics as confusing and unnecessarily complicated for foreign users.

Only time will tell whether Czechs will change their views in future with regard to registering IDNs under .CZ, but on the basis of the current trend, that does not look likely.

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