ICANN set to allow non-Latin characters in domain names, half the world rejoices

In the name of cultural and linguistic diversity, our loyal comrades over at the ICANN are about to approve availability of domain names in non-Latin alphabets. That's right, Chinese and Japanese folks will finally be able to address their websites in their native tongue, as will fans of Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek or Hindi scripts. Basically, linguists of every type are finally invited to the interwebs party, a move described by ICANN chairman Peter Thrush as "the biggest change technically to the internet since it was invented." This follows an extensive two-year testing period for a translation engine that can convert your lazy Latin scribblings into the refined hieroglyphics of modern Cantonese. Pending approval this Friday, the first new domain names will start coming out in 2010, when we can expect a whole new wave of internet land grabbing.

[Via Switched]

[Eternal Density Posted Oct 29th 2009 10:22PM]

Browsers will be updated (or have plugins) to highlight non-latin characters in urls to cut down on their effectiveness in phishing and similar misdirects.

[telstar Posted Oct 29th 2009 10:59PM]

This is just going to make it more difficult to detect whether you're going to paypal.com or some weird funny-lettered version of it.

[MSM Posted Oct 29th 2009 11:01PM]

How will Arabic work with this?

Its a right-to-left language...

So will www.google.com be

www.جوجل.com

Maybe arabic websites can use this as they can use their arabic name, for example

www.aljazeera.com can be

www.الجزيره.com

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 30th 2009 3:38AM]

Imagine if all domains in the beginning were only in Chinese then we would probably disagree that they should be in English as well. The Internet is global and local and should be used by anyone in their local language. If the whole content of a website is in Russian, only for Russian speaking users, then why shouldn´t the domain be in Russian? Anyway, this has been underway for a long time. The only hurdle has been the technology barrier, not if all languages should be represented.

[Zangetsu Posted Oct 30th 2009 7:09PM]

I foresee a lot of people in the US not being able to access the sites of their language at university, library or work computers, since a lot of those places lock the control panel (and thus prevent keyboard language switching). It's sure going to suck if some foreign language site takes off (but isn't popular enough to have an English mirror domain) and I need to update the language settings on my OS just to visit one or two sites.

Mostly I'm worried about phishers.

[Kree Posted Nov 1st 2009 5:43AM]

www.ಠ-ಠ.com