Domains to go non-English: will it cause internet havoc?

[RAV TUX]

Domains to go non-English: will it cause internet havoc?


11th October 2007
Angus Kidman
A plan to allow non-Roman characters in domain names will make the Internet more international than ever, but Australians look set to play a major role in determining its success. ICANN, which is responsible for managing global domain policies, will on October 15 begin testing of whether allowing the character sets of 11 languages to be included in top-level domains (TLDs) causes widespread online chaos.
Currently, TLDs such as .com or .au are limited to using the letters a to z from the Roman alphabet.
"This evaluation represents ICANN’s most important step so far towards the full implementation of Internationalised Domain Names," ICANN's president, Australian Dr Paul Twomey, boasted in a statement. "This will be one of the biggest changes to the Internet since it was created."
The initial test doesn't mean that you can sneakily go out and register any domain name you like in those languages using new characters. Initially, ICANN wants people to link to the domain example.test in each of 11 target language character sets -- Arabic, Chinese simplified, Chinese traditional, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Russian, Tamil and Yiddish -- to see what kind of issues it creates in different applications and whether it impacts DNS stability.
The example.test site will host a wiki enabling the creation of pages within the tested target languages.
Australians are likely to have a large role to play in that testing. "Australians have been quite involved in ICANN -- much more than any GDP or per capita basis would suggest," Twomey noted during a local press briefing earlier this year.
Three of the languages being tested, Greek, Cantonese (in Chinese script) and Arabic, are amongst the top five non-English languages spoken in Australian, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
ICANN had originally planned to set up versions of the .test site and domain in 20 languages, but is now concentrating on communities that expressed enthusiasm for the testing process and languages which have been used in earlier laboratory tests.
The .test TLD will not remain permanently in place.
As well as handling new character sets, the introduction of multi-language TLDs also requires that root servers can process addresses presented in right-to-left reading languages such as Arabic.http://apcmag.com/7332/domains_to_go_non_english_will_it_cause_internet_h avoc

[RAV TUX]

This is really cool here is an example:
http://ייִדיש.idn.icann.org/%D7%94%D7%95%D7%99%D7%A4%D6%BC%D7%98_%D7%96%D7%B2% D6%B7%D7%98

[jflaker]

It would, a little.

In a global economy, it is wise to sell to as wide of an audience as possible. Sites that I can not input are sites I am not visiting and if they sell something, it is money i am not spending.

My 2 cents.......I don't think it would be wide spread, It will most likely be regional in nature for non commerce sites.

[LaRoza]

If the domain in a non latin character set, I am assuming the site isn't either, so people that go to those sites will have the knowledge and keyboards.

[LaRoza]

This is really cool here is an example:
http://ייִדיש.idn.icann.org/%D7%94%D7%95%D7%99%D7%A4%D6%BC%D7%98_%D7%96%D7%B2% D6%B7%D7%98

A backwards wiki, cool.

[hanzomon4]

This is really cool here is an example:
http://ייִדיש.idn.icann.org/%D7%94%D7%95%D7%99%D7%A4%D6%BC%D7%98_%D7%96%D7%B2% D6%B7%D7%98

Cool, Klingon....

[SunnyRabbiera]

Cool, Klingon....

no, I think that is yiddish

[adam.tropics]

wow, if someone gave me a business card with that (http://ייִדיש.idn.icann.org) on it, I'd be a week trying to type it in!

[Arathorn]

Confusing title in that article. The internet has had non-English pages almost from the beginning. What they mean is non-Latin, not in the Latin alphabet, but Arab or Chinese for example.

[popch]

Confusing title in that article. The internet has had non-English pages almost from the beginning. What they mean is non-Latin, not in the Latin alphabet, but Arab or Chinese for example.

Or German or some of the skandinavian languages, for that matter.

What about the Schöne Müllerin?

One problem already known about using extended character sets in domain names: It makes it easier to spoof URLs. Just use an innocent looking glyph which is actually part of a completely different alphabet than the one expected.

How do you tell - visually - Microsoft from Micrഠsoft? And I have picked a character which can in fact be told from its roman lookalike.

Not internetm havoc, but one more thing to be wary of.

[Arathorn]

German uses the Latin alphabet as well, just extended. What script is the fake "o" from your example from by the way?
I agree that the use of different scripts can help scammers, but perhaps future browser versions can warn the user whenever he / she enters a site which uses a mix of scripts in it's sitename. It shouldn't be hard for a browser to detect in your example that it uses a different script for just one letter.

[TeraDyne]

I think it's interesting, even if it really wouldn't affect me. Well, I do visit Japanese sites, so might have to start using Katakana and\or Hiragana. >_>;

[RAV TUX]

Confusing title in that article. The internet has had non-English pages almost from the beginning. What they mean is non-Latin, not in the Latin alphabet, but Arab or Chinese for example.They are not talking about webpages, they are talking about domain names.

[RAV TUX]

no, I think that is yiddish=Hebrew

[Crashmaxx]

That link shows up as "http://ייִדיש.idn.icann.org/%D7%94%D7%95%D7%99%D7%A4%D6%BC%D7%98_%D7%96%D7%B2% D6%B7%D7%98" for me, which is just terrible. I don't know about chaos, but I won't be going to any sites like that anytime soon.

Personally, I think it is a dumb idea, and I just hope I don't need to use a site with such an awful domain anytime soon.

[D-EJ915]

The main problem is, not everyone can type the URL in, which is the entire reason why they are as they exist now.

[Eddie Wilson]

Ok, so now after all of this, what is the benefit?
Eddie

[D-EJ915]

Ok, so now after all of this, what is the benefit?
Eddie
There are just some web sites a lot of people can't get to, they probably wouldn't go there anyway, but you never know.

[hanzomon4]

I think it's cool, maybe it will encourage more people to take interest in other languages.

[adam.tropics]

I think it's cool, maybe it will encourage more people to take interest in other languages.

We can only hope. (I've always hoped the command line would encourage more people into Linux too, but that hasn't happened!!)

[popch]

Domain names have been using extended character sets for some time. The article appears to be about top level domains.

Some of the members here argue that names written in latin characters are legible for all while names written in other alphabets are legible for fewer people.

That might even not be true when looked at globally. Regionally speaking, it isn't true in most places. Why should - say - all Chinese people be obliged to learn to spell chinese words in latin letters? When there's not even an agreed-upon standard to do so?

The fake o I used was from the Malayalan script. There's also a very nice faked s in the same script.

[SomeGuyDude]

Fine by me.

Generally speaking, if I can't understand the URL I'm not going to be able to understand the website, so why do I care if some Arabic, Japanese, or Indian website uses their own characters in the URL?

I only see this as a good thing. Makes the world easier for them.

[Total_Biscuit]

The fake o I used was from the Malayalan script. There's also a very nice faked s in the same script.
So that's what it was! I reckon that I won't be visiting many sites that use a character set for which I don't have an installed font.

[daynah]

Fine by me.

Generally speaking, if I can't understand the URL I'm not going to be able to understand the website, so why do I care if some Arabic, Japanese, or Indian website uses their own characters in the URL?

I only see this as a good thing. Makes the world easier for them.

Amen! Ya'll aren't going to visit a korean website of you don't speak korean anyway, so why does it matter if you can type it into the browser?

If someone is marketing to english speakers, they will make their domain accessable to english speakers. If not, they obviously don't care about your money so why do you care about them? They probably wont even ship here.

The only thing I can see is more opportunities for fake URLs or whatevery they are called. Like... WlKlPEDlA.com (it's lowercase Ls, silly!). But the increased activity in these other countries, I think, far out weighs the problems that the major websites will be having. They have to fight for their own trademarks, ICANN doesn't do that for them. :)

[argie]

What I'm curious about is whether there'll be domains like gmäil.com set up for phishing or other stuff that's similar. I suppose that can't be helped.

[RAV TUX]

Amen! Ya'll aren't going to visit a korean website of you don't speak korean anyway, so why does it matter if you can type it into the browser?

If someone is marketing to english speakers, they will make their domain accessable to english speakers. If not, they obviously don't care about your money so why do you care about them? They probably wont even ship here.

The only thing I can see is more opportunities for fake URLs or whatevery they are called. Like... WlKlPEDlA.com (it's lowercase Ls, silly!). But the increased activity in these other countries, I think, far out weighs the problems that the major websites will be having. They have to fight for their own trademarks, ICANN doesn't do that for them. :)

I actually frequent Korean and Japanese websites on a regular basis.

As long as someone can copy and paste the url, which they can all is good.

As long as google continues to translate these websites that is all good.

If I only visited English websites I would miss a lot that is developing in the world.

I think it is a good thing overall.

[D-EJ915]

for Japanese it's not bad because the way you type in Japanese is you enter the romanization anyway, so it just makes the urls shorter looking, so there's kinda no point for Japanese, but for typsets that don't work that way (like hebrew, cyrillic) it is definitely useful.

I agree it is a good thing, it's definitely an improvement for hebrew, etc.

What I'm curious about is whether there'll be domains like gmäil.com set up for phishing or other stuff that's similar. I suppose that can't be helped.That's definitely an issue and will most likely happen, unfortunate state that we're in though, like you said, can't be helped.