Will New Internet Domain Names Change the Web?

Will New Internet Domain Names Change the Web? (pcworld.com)

9 points by newacc 16 years ago | 16 comments

vaksel 16 years ago |

oh please, like we are supposed to believe ICANN cares about internalization. The only reason they want to do this, is to make more money off the fees from the idiots who'll buy these crappy domains.

We've seen hundreds of TLDs launched that were touted as game changers. .info, .biz, .us, and those are the big ones, and noone wants them. .COM is king, it is ingrained in internet users worldwide.

Yes local countries have their .rus and .chs but that's the whole point. The QWERTY keyboard is the standard worldwide.

Trying to bypass that, just reeks of opportunism

ramchip 16 years ago | |

You'd be surprised. I'd say the vast majority of URLs I see around in Japan end in .jp. Hitting ctrl+enter after an URL will add www and .co.jp on most computers, not .com. Few people understand english sufficiently to browse the english-speaking internet; the best example is probably Facebook, which is rarely used here, while its local equivalent mixi.jp is extremely popular.

Also, the QWERTY keyboard is just not the standard worldwide...

That being said, I don't think people will start using japanese URLs much. The alphabet + .jp is already ingrained and more convenient. Also, most phones will refuse japanese characters in an email adress and perhaps in an URL, which is a game breaker here.

blasdel 16 years ago | | |

Facebook has extraordinarily good localizations, done primarily by their active users: http://www.facebook.com/translations/

Japaneses tastes are quite different when it comes to design, anonymity, and personal privacy -- and the divergent social network doesn't help anything.

skinnymuch 16 years ago | |

Hey, hey! Don't be putting down .info. It brought about millions of spam sites!

yangyang 16 years ago | |

> The QWERTY keyboard is the standard worldwide.

Try telling that to a frenchman.

zeeone 16 years ago |

Internationalizing the domains names is utterly pointless. Most keyboards in the world are in latin, which means that people who use a different alphabet have to switch keyboard mode. It's just not convenient. Imagine this:

  > goole.com
  > Alt-Shift-Win (to switch)
  > говедо.ком
  > Alt-Shift-Win (switch back)

Bah ... bulshit.

ivan_i 16 years ago | |

Why do you think that Google woudn't register something like гугл.рф? I think it's for folks from the pure rural areas who don't know the latin alphabet at all. They have a right to use computers and the internet too.

dmix 16 years ago | | |

But... the keyboards.

zeeone 16 years ago | | |

You're missing the point. The folks in the rural areas won't be able to use a computer in the first place, because the keyboards are in latin. I've never seen a Cyrillic or Arabic keyboard.

wgj 16 years ago |

I thought this ICANN decision just opened the way for internationalized TLDs, and that the rest of the domain name was already internationalized. Thanks to anyone who can help clarify this.

wgj 16 years ago | |

I answered myself on this other thread. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=913284

Every other part of the URL including the rest of the domain name can already be Unicode encoded. This is how spoofing attacks are formed by using non-Latin characters in domain names that look like the Latin characters they replace.

This latest ICANN decision doesn't seem to make anything less convenient for the English speaking world than it already was.

thaumaturgy 16 years ago | | |

Yeah, this is the biggest problem with the proposed change to URLs. When you can have two different characters that are visually identical but have different meaning to computers, you have a serious security problem.

nazgulnarsil 16 years ago |

I call ಠ_ಠ.com

NikkiA 16 years ago | |

That was already feasible, this news is about punycoding of the TLD, punycode in the non-TLD portion was already allowed.