From what is known, on September 8th the first stage of registration with Ñ, accents and Portuguese characters. This stage ends on December 16th 2008.
Normally, there is always the concern and nervousness to register the domains as fast as possible so that no one else gets to it before we do, but according to NICs rules for this stage it is very hard for someone to anticipate.
In the case of the IDNs in Argentina we asked how would the system for requests work and we propose many scenarios to see what would happen.
We were told that the registration system would work the following way:

1.- The most important rule on this stage is that only those who have registered a domain name before July 31st 2008 without multilingual characters will be able to request the domain with IDN following NIC Argentina’s rule.
A common error is that some people has suppose that they can register domains in other languages, for example: If you have informaciones.com.ar you could register informaçoes.com.ar but this not correct since only substitutions of characters are allowed but not translations of languages.

2.- The system of IDN is not only for extension com.ar but also for net.ar, org.ar, etc. If I have the domain papa.com.ar registered before July 31st I can register papá.com.ar.
What happens if a person has registered a domain papa.com.ar and another person has papa.net.ar? The owner of papa.com.ar can register papá.com.ar and the owner of papa.net.ar can register papá.net.ar. Having a domain net.ar does not give you right to request a com.ar.

3.- In those cases where a person has the domain ninyo.com.ar and another company has the domain nino.com.ar, under the rules of substitution both have the right to register niño.com.ar, then who keeps the domain? The one who has the domain name from before and prior to July 31st will keep it.

4.- It is also very interesting that the owner of the domain a.com.ar has practically secured the domains: á.com.ar, â.com.ar, ã.com.ar and à.com.ar.
Last but not least the ones who have registered the domains: n.com.ar, nh.com.ar, ni.com.ar, nn.com.ar, ny.com.ar and gn.com.ar, under the rules of substitution all can request the domain ñ.com.ar, but the owner of ny.com.ar will keep it since he has it registered first (on April 1998) and before July 31st 2008.

Juan Enrique Sánchez S.
President
jesanchez@ nameaction.com

www.nameaction.com
Domains Latin América