True. And NEW.net was definitely vanity…
There’s plenty of site’s cheaper than that even in English. You can also have dot com IDNs they only cost $7 a pop.
I was referring to .jp extensions – obviously an IDN .com would only cost what you would pay for a normal domain name, or maybe a wee bit more depending on the registrar.
In my years of developing sites I’ve always viewed adult & gambling marketers to be cutting edge. I have a portfolio of the best Japanese generic terms. Most of them (that are parked) are already getting traffic. These are fresh regs after I get them indexed I’ll let you know how well Bingo, & roulette show up in SERPS for the term.
We shall see – they (meaning IDNs) are worthless today. They may not be worthless tomorrow but ultimately the determining factor will be market adoption of IDN names, plus what additional value a search engine places on the domain name IF it can read it without having to resort to punycode (if it does work, I think this could only be an advantage).
In Japan, for example, you would know that there are numerous input methods for numerous character sets (kanji, hiragana, katakana). In order to enter an IDN URL in the address bar, it would require at least two input methods, which quite frankly is very irritating.
Now, if an IDN also had a foreign language extension, that I would agree could be potentially very useful.
As for the hacking – it’s not just phishing we’re talking about – there are documented problems with scripting which can compromise security.
Frankly, I’d like to see IDNs work and be widely adopted. But forgive me if I am a bit skeptical at the moment.