ICANN has kept a pretty tight hold on single-letter ASCII domains. Only a few are not currently reserved by ICANN, (x.com for example is in use today), and I believe ICANN has a plan to auction them off soon, a process that I’m sure will generate huge excitement and many millions of dollars for the ICANN coffers.

But the same is not true for single-letter (and other single-character) IDN domains. They are all “out there” today, available to be registered, and bought and sold on the resale market.

Historical Note: I believe IDN single-letter domains were allowed to be registered because when they are encoded as ASCII domains, in punycode “xn--” format, they are actually a minimum of five characters in length, not just one character as with normal ASCII single-letter domains. So really it was an oversight – nobody thought to ask the question “should these domains be reserved by the registry”, and now of course it is too late to ask such policy questions….

Since single-character IDN domains are likely to be highly sought after in the near future, I will dedicate a number of posts to looking at them in detail. For example, just how many are there, which scripts and languages they come from, are they all registered, and how will any changes to the IDNA protocol affect them?

Filed under:
ICANN, IDNA, Single Letter IDN Domains by Lee Hodgson