Brussels, 10 September 2009 – EURid is pleased to announce that .eu will support internationalized domain names (IDNs) effective 10 December. For the first time, residents of the European Union will be able to register a .eu domain name made up of non-Latin characters.

“IDNs are particularly important for .eu,” notes Marc Van Wesemael, EURid General Manager.

“EURid supports all twenty-three official EU languages, and our employees come from twenty of the twenty-seven Member States. Supporting the use and growth of Internationalized Domain Names comes naturally to us.”

IDNs are domain names that contain characters from non-ASCII character sets. Examples include the Swedish å, the German ü, the Romanian ş and characters from the Bulgarian and Greek alphabets as a whole.

Van Wesemael made the announcement at the EURid Registrar Meeting held in Brussels today. More information about .eu IDNs can be found here.

EURid managers also announced that a .eu DNSSEC testbed will become available to registrars on 13 October. Such information is an important part of each annual meeting. That is why registrars were able to participate this year via a streaming-video webinar if they were unable to attend in person.