From the start of July, PIR (Public Interest Registry) will provide domain-name sellers with a $5 rebate for every domain they sell in Latin America and India. The cost to registrars is $6 per domain per year, and they are usually sold for a few extra dollars to consumers.

Registrars will not be obliged to hand the rebate to the end user, but PIR president and CEO Edward Viltz told us he hoped some of it will trickle down to those hoping for their own piece of cyberspace. The scheme thereby works two-fold: it gives registrars a greater incentive to sell .org domains, while at the same time reducing the price of domains for those in some of the world's poorest countries.

PIR will start selling .org domains in eight different languages from this weekend (23 July). Danish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish and Swedish will be added to existing German domains, opening the first front on a much larger push for "internationalised domain names" or IDNs.

All domains registered in the eight new languages from 23 July to 22 August will be locked until 21 September in order to give companies the opportunity to check for any intellectual property infringements, and then will be released onto the market.

IDNs are currently not supported by Internet Explorer but expected to be available in beta this summer.

via The Register