cheap healthy recipes: ICANN - Set to Approve Internationalised Domain Names

ICANN - Set to Approve Internationalised Domain Names

chinese domain name

Domain names are currently based on the Latin alphabet. This is great for English speaking countries such as the United States, United Kingdom and Australia but what about countries that have their own characters.

It is estimated that more than half of the 1.6 billion Internet users online today use non-Latin characters in their language. These people will be able to register domain names in their local language very soon.

Will this just be another revenue raising exercise where companies have to register more domain names to protect their intellectual property?

Support languages

There is 17 languages to be introduced include Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and Chinese plus more.

I think it's going to be very confusing when advertising these international domain names. They will obviously be geographically targeted but also towards the locals only.

English people understanding the new domains

I've seen many different character sets when using keywords in cybercafes while traveling around. Sometimes you are only in a country for a few days before moving on. I just do not know how outsiders will be able to use these domains. Having an English domain name as well is just going to double up on everything.

English people have been very lucky on the Internet. Imagine if the Internet was all in Chinese? Everyone would have to learn Chinese otherwise they would not be able to do much on the Internet.

Conclusion

The technical work involved to accomplish this is a bit like introducing IPv6. These are both mighty tasks which I think need to be overcome to continue the growth of the Internet and open it up to more communities.