ICANN Approves Internationalized Chinese Domain Names

philalethiac writes "Millions of Chinese language users will soon be able to access the Internet using Chinese script following a decision today by ICANN's Board of Directors to approve a set of Chinese language internationalized domain names."

Comments

Do they resolve to cn or are they seperate?

[pavon]

I have heard conflicting information about this. I know the new ccTLDs for China (they approved two - traditional and simplified) are aliases for each other (resolve to the same sites), but are they also both aliases for the existing cn ccTLD or do they resolve to an entirely new domain? If they are separate, why did they choose to do it this way? It seems like it would only cause confusion.

Oh, and damn slashdot and it's lack of unicode support. It would be nice to be able to type the damn things when talking about them.

Re:left-to-right-top-to-bottom-you-silly-foreigner

[Anonymous Coward]

Americans don't get worked up over the intrusion of other languages, we just thing that everyone in the world should speak English as a 2nd language.

Sure, there'll be some Americans who will get worked up, but for the most part it is not a deep held belief.Its not like we require people to speak English; many government forms are available in many, many languages. Its not uncommon for larger cities to have areas where advertising is in Spanish or on of the many Asian languages.

Regarding the expressiveness of Chinese characters

[tenchikaibyaku]

This looks like a perfect opportunity to highlight this recent post at the Pinyin News blog, closely related to the issue at hand! (Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with the blog in any way, but as a former student of Japanese I can relate to the general message.)

Re:Time to revisit oldschool phishing attacks

[Trepidity]

There are some attempts to mitigate the problem, though you're right that it can be one. Some registrars are limiting the characters that can appear in their domain, and there's a push to make that more widespread. One approach is to limit to "local" scripts only, so e.g. Cyrillic or Latin in .ru, but no Telegu or CJK in .ru. That greatly limits the number of clashing pairs compared to allowing all of Unicode. Some registers also have policies on not permitting certain known clashes, such as allowing two domains to be registered that are identical, except for one having a Latin 'a' where the other has a Cyrillic 'a' (which look identical in most fonts).

Firefox and Opera will only display the internationalized Unicode name for TLDs that are whitelisted as having a "safe" policy on the subject, and will display the punycode for other domains. Here is Mozilla's current policy.

compromise idea to prevent regional isolation

[ad454]

Looks like the domain names will be encoded using punycode instead of the cleaner UTF8 encoding:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode

However, my biggest concern is that the use of non-ascii characters in domain names breaks the whole International nature of the web, and imposes regional barriers. Your mail client and mail server software might not be too happy with you trying to send an e-mail to "joe@.jp" or "joe@.jp-r14k153opxc" in punycode. (Crap, it looks like slashdot does not accept international characters in comment submission, so you can't read this: "日本人".)

Remember that very few people have rendering and fonts for every written language on the planet, so most people will be cut off from many websites.) With the current IPv4 shortage, one can no longer reliable just use an IP address to access a specific website, e-mail address, etc., since a single IP address can host many domain names.

Personally I think that the best compromise solution would be to only allow non-ascii characters for domain names in different languages if there are submitted with a paired up romainization version that can be equally accepted for the same domain. So using my previous example, one could equally specify ".jp" in Japanese Kanji, ".jp-yn9d427hcvb" in punycode, or "nihonjin .jp" in Romanji. That way you can still cater to a local/regional audience, and still allow everyone else in the planet to reach you.

For those that argue that it does not matter if a domain name is only specified in a foreign language, if all of the hosted content is in the same foreign language forget about all of current International collaboration in Mathematical, Scientific, Engineering, Programming, and other fields. (You can write an entire math proof or software program using only symbols without a single human word.)

Even for individual one-on-one e-mail communications between people in different countries that are able to communicate in a common language this would still be a problem, since a large percentage of e-mail accounts are hosted with a user's local ISP, that in future may leave them stuck with a non-ASCII e-mail address that would cut them off from the rest of the world.

Re:compromise idea to prevent regional isolation

[Trepidity]

In practice, everyone does anyway. I don't know of any country where the people who use the internet haven't already developed at least some informal way of writing in the Latin alphabet, at least for short snippets like addresses. Many seem to prefer it even when alternatives are available--- for example, Facebook supports UTF-8 status updates, but my Greek cousins use Greek transliterated into ASCII more often than they use the Greek alphabet.

Re:compromise idea to prevent regional isolation

[Anonymous Coward]

A huge number of people with non-Latin character sets will have access to the internet through their mobile phones, and they should not have to learn Latin letters to access local information, or have to switch input language to go to another site. Delivery of accurate information to farmers about the price of produce, for example, should not be restricted to those who know English, even if it was good enough for Jesus.

There is more to the internet than updating your facebook status and chat rooms.

Re:compromise idea to prevent regional isolation

[Anonymous Coward]

Both yes and no.

Let me give you Afrikaans as a very simple example that I can type in /.:

There are far more than 5 vowels, so the rest are written using diacritics (such as ê) and pairs of vowels (such as ou).

In order to distinguish between (for example) oe as a single vowel and oe as two separate vowels, we indicate the syllabic breaks with yet more diacritics. So "hoër" means higher, while "hoer" means "whore". There is absolutely no other way to write it, because unlike the Germans we cannot just add another e to indicate diacritics (forming a different vowel/combination of vowels/diphthong).

Around here, you can only buy American English keyboards. (Try to teach the idiot on the street how to use US-international settings, I dare you.) People usually drop the diacritics, because they don't know how to type them. (When they are used, it's because someone has memorised those stupid alt-### codes.) Of course, context can usually make up for the ambiguity.

This means, however, that no Afrikaans high school can have a website URL that a) uses its correct name b) can be typed by those who wish to visit it and c) will not be read as "whore school" by giggling kids.

This is a language already using the Latin alphabet. Now imagine what happens in the rest of the world, when they are forced to romanise their writing.

Re:! Ha!

[donscarletti]

Ah, pinyin, the writing system that 1.3 billion people can write, and only primary school kids can read. To be able to write in a valid language and never be fear that it will be read by anyone important is liberating. For example:

xie2xian4dian3 shi4 zhai2nan2 de xin1wen2 dan1shi4 wang2zhan4 de ji4shu4 fang1mian4 chu1chou4, er2qie4 nei4rong2 shi4 gou3pi4. wo3 gan4le4 zhong1xiao4 mo4xi1ge1zhuan3 de ma1 de bi1. (Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters. Commander Taco's mother is a classy lady)

Though on a more serious note, this is a little bit worrying. OK, ICANN is allowing Chinese domain names, this is no huge problem to me, since I can read and write Chinese anyway. But the Chinese will be pissed off when Japanese start using Kana and they are no longer able to enter the correct domain names to look up porn. I think this just screws the world all over in the long run, at least EVERYONE knows ascii.

Re:Why?

[BiggerIsBetter]

Everything that's even remotely interesting on the Internet is either blocked in China or English language. Native Chinese sites is nothing but censored propaganda anyway.

There are plenty of Chinese folks all around the world who would like to use this. It's not just the mainland.