DNS-LU announces the opening of IDNs

As of February 1st 2010 registration of domain names with special characters in them, like for example a letter with an accent, called Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) .lu will be possible. Acceptable special caracters are those communly used in Luxembourgish, German and French languages.

There will be a two months sunrise period between February 1^st 2010 and March 31^st 2010. During this sunrise period owners of registered .lu names will be able to register the identical names with special caracters. After this sunrise period beginning April 1^st 2010 IDN registrations will be open for everybody and performed on a “first-come, first-served basis”.

The allowed character for IDN will be those necessary for Luxemburgish, French or German. Besides the currently accepted caracters (a-z, 0-9, – (hyphen)) these are:

• U+00E4 Latin small letter a with diaeresis (ä)
• U+00F6 Latin small letter o with diaeresis (ö)
• U+00FC Latin small letter u with diaeresis (ü)
• U+00E0 Latin small letter a with grave (à)
• U+00E2 Latin small letter a with circumflex (â)
• U+00E6 Latin small letter ae (æ)
• U+00E7 Latin small letter c with cedilla (ç)
• U+00E8 Latin small letter e with grave (è)
• U+00E9 Latin small letter e with acute (é)
• U+00EA Latin small letter e with circumflex (ê)
• U+00EB Latin small letter e with diaeresis (ë)
• U+00EE Latin small letter i with circumflex (î)
• U+00EF Latin small letter i with diaeresis (ï)
• U+00F4 Latin small letter o with circumflex (ô)
• U+00F9 Latin small letter u with grave (ù)
• U+00FB Latin small letter u with circumflex (û)
• U+0153 Latin small ligature oe (œ)

The domain names eligible during the sunrise period are those derived from an existing domain name by replacing one or more characters with the same base character with a diacritic, or by applying the general replacement convention (e.g. ü=ue).

Mapping table:

• a: à, â, ä
• c: ç
• e: é, è, ê, ë
• i: î, ï
• o: ô, ö
• u: ù, û, ü
• ae: æ, ä
• oe: œ, ö
• ue: ü

An IDN must be registered to the same holder (same name, same address) as the similar ASCII domain name. The registrar does not have to be the same for both names. Trade of IDNs registered during the sunrise period will be blocked until the end of the sunrise (March 31^st).