
Will New Internet Domain Names Change the Web?  - newacc
http://www.pcworld.com/article/181085/will_new_internet_domain_names_change_the_web.html
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vaksel
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

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ramchip
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.

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blasdel
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.

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zeeone
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.

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ivan_i
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.

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zeeone
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.

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denik
Every keyboard sold in Russia has both latin and cyrillic letters on it.

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ilyak
...and newer Windows default on the local (i.e. cyrillic) layout.

Some clueless linux distros even install cyrillic layout as the only one;
which is completely unusable of course.

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wgj
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
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.

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thaumaturgy
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.

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nazgulnarsil
I call ಠ_ಠ.com

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

