Public Interest Registry Offers New Internationalized Domain Names To General Public

-- Three New Top-Level Domains Now Available for Registration

RESTON, Virginia, May 27, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Public Interest Registry – the not-for-profit operator of the .org domain – today announced the general availability of three new Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) which translate to "organisation" or "institution" in non-Latin-based scripts – one in Devanagari, one in Cyrillic, and one in simplified Chinese. Previously only available to qualified domain trademark holders, all interested companies, organisations and individuals can now register for the new domains.

With these new IDNs serving as useful branding tools, the domains will enable website owners to brand their addresses in native scripts, ultimately making the Internet more user-friendly and encouraging heightened communication.

"Our mission at Public Interest Registry has always been to help organisations maximize their audience reach and better communicate their missions, activities and accomplishments. The launch of these new international domain names speaks to the heart of that mission," said Brian Cute, CEO of Public Interest Registry. "Now, organisations of all sizes will have the opportunity to brand their website addresses in localized scripts, ensuring that their causes and passions resonate on regional and global levels."

Currently, there are approximately:

• 143.5 million people in Russia using Russian Cyrillic as the official alphabet for their national language
• 497 million people speaking Hindi as a first language and 120 million as a second language.
• 1.4 billion people speaking and writing in some form of Chinese.

In recent years, Public Interest Registry has emerged at the forefront of support for use of alternative scripts, having worked closely with standards-setting bodies and members of the engineering community to create and launch a number of alternative scripts for second-level names associated with .org. To date, the registrar supports 11 IDNs available for user adoption with .org in languages that include Danish, German, Hungarian, Polish, Spanish and Swedish, among others.

For more information about Public Interest Registry or for the full list of registrars offering the new IDNs, please visit www.pir.org.  

About Public Interest Registry
Public Interest Registry is a nonprofit corporation that operates the .org top-level domain -- the world's third largest "generic" top-level domain with more than 10 million domain names registered worldwide. As an advocate for collaboration, safety and security on the Internet, Public Interest Registry's mission is to empower the global noncommercial community to use the Internet more effectively, and to take a leadership position among Internet stakeholders on policy and other issues relating to the domain naming system. Public Interest Registry was founded by the Internet Society (http://www.internetsociety.org) in 2002 and is based in Reston, Virginia, USA.

Contact:
Lindsay Hyman
+1-202-223-9260
pir@allisonpr.com