The Internet Names Authorization & Information Center (INAIC)

	Charles Clark		London, 3 July 2008. Today Charles Clark, Director of Public-Root Ltd., proudly announced the registration of the first single character multilingual TLD on the entire Internet. The name of the TLD is the first letter of the Greek alphabet, Alpha . (TLD: .α or Greek: Αλφα). In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 1. In both Classical Greek and Modern Greek, alpha represents the Open front unrounded vowel, /a/. Alpha, both as a symbol and term, is used to refer to or describe a variety of things, including the first or most significant occurrence of something. TLD: .α. A very appropriate name for the first single character multilingual TLD in the world.
TLD: .α is registered by a technology venture development company in the Netherlands through UN1D. Mr. Clark spoke of a ground-breaking, historical event and congratulated UN1D with the registration of this unique TLD. At first, the INAIC Council, a committee composed of seven independent volunteers that approves creates and delegates new Top-Level Domains (TLDs) in the Public-Root, was reluctant to delegate this TLD because the registrant's motivation as not sufficiently clear. Because there are only a limited number of single character TLDs available in the Inclusive Name Space (INS), the INAIC council adopted a policy to delegate these rare TLDs. The INAIC Council only considers to delegate a single character TLD to people or corporations who are able to convince the Council that the TLD will be used for a very good purpose. If the registrant fails to convince the Council, the application most certainly will be denied. In addition the registration fee of a single character TLD is 10 times the registration fee of a normal TLD. The registration fee to register a single character TLD is currently: $ 10,000.00 USD! Rhio Hartawan, a member of the INAIC Council declared: "While the Council was divided, we received an additional compelling motivation from the applicant that convinced the Council that the TLD would be used for an excellent purpose and subsequently the TLD was approved." The first multilingual TLDs registered in the Public-Root were 3 Chinese TLDs and these are still resolving today. Hans Bakker, former director of Public-Root Ltd., established a Multilingual Top-Level Domain Task Force in order to develop dedicated multilingual software to enable the global registration of multilingual TLDs for all languages. The Multilingual TLD Project utilizes protocols developed at the IETF to support Internationalized Domain Names. Multilingual TLDs and IDNs empower users and providers through multilingual language support. Users navigate the Internet in any language and web developers can reach and advertise to target audiences in their local script. Internationalized Top Level Domains (iTLDs) or Multilingual TLDs are the next logical step in the integration of IDN into the domain name system (DNS). In 2007 the Multilingual project was completed and UN1D was the first TLD Registrar in the world to make the online registration of Multilingual TLDs available to everyone. Now, in 2008, UN1D is the first to facilitate the registration of the world's first single character TLD. Today the Internet became again a little bit less dependent on the English language