Service & Support
nic.at and IDN
Since 03/31/2004 it has become possible to register Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) for .at-, .or- and .co.at-domains. Additional 34 characters can be included in the registration. These new characters consist of the small letters from the ISO 8859-1 character string and the tree characters œ, š and ž from the Unicode string Latin Extended-A. Please find further details here.
The note the following aspects regarding IDN:
- First come, first served
Just like regular domains, IDN have also been delegated according to the “first come, first served” principle. Domain holders who already own a domain with the transcription of the umlaut (e.g. buecher.at) will not be favoured regarding the registration of the corresponding IDN. Furthermore it has to be noted that IDN are subject to the same regulations regarding the rights of third parties as regular .at-domains. Thus, applicants should make sure that no rights to a name, trade mark rights or other rights are infringed by the registration.
- Subject of the contract
The subject of the contract between nic.at and the domain holder is the IDN domain (e.g. müller.at).
- Whois-database and invoice
In order to ensure the uniqueness of the domain, the Whois-database on our website displays both the IDN and the Punycode.
- Browsers that support IDN
Below you can find a list of IDN-compatible browsers that are known to us. Please contact the respective producer if you have any questions or problems. This list is not exhaustive:
• Konqueror (from version KDE 3.2 + GNU IDN Library)
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.x and 6.x + Verisign i-Nav
TM PlugIn
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 7
• Mozilla 1.4 and higher
• Mozilla Firefox
• Netscape 7.1 and higher
• Opera 7.11 and higher
Contact: idn
nic.at 
Related Links
- RIPE Network Coordination Centre
- W3C World Wide Web Consortium
- Internet Engineering Task Force
- RFC Editor
Related FAQ
What are the technical reasons for the rejection of a domain application?
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There are various reasons why an application may be rejected: errors in the application itself (incomplete field descriptions, missing mandatory fields, invalid version etc.), invalid domain names, wrong entry formats, invalid characters. The most frequent source of error is an incorrect nameserver configuration. Please click here for more information about the application check and nameserver configuration.
How often are the nic.at nameservers reloaded?
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4 times a day: at 10:00 am, 1:30, 5:30 and 10.00 pm (CET).
What does IDN mean?
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IDN is for "Internationalized Domain Name", which is a standard that enables the use of other characters in addition to the currently allowed ASCII-characters (the 26 Latin letters, the ten numbers 0 – 9 and the hyphen) for domain names. The respective registry decides which additional characters are allowed with the implementation of IDN.