On 16 June 2020 Verisign was granted a patent by the US Patent and Trademark Office for Alternative character set domain name suggestion and registration using translation and transliteration.
The patent describes technology to resolve an issue which has presented a barrier to Universal Acceptance, namely, the gap between IDN registration and IDN usage. Previously, registrants using characters outside the ASCII range used in traditional domain names have faced difficulty finding domain names in their native language, checking their availability status, and registering them.
The patent describes a way for searchers to enter a word and see both translations and transliterations of the word, and check their domain registration status. For example, a user might enter a search for ‘house’ in ASCII and the search would return translations and transliterations in other languages. The user is then able to see if the domains are available or registered.