ICANN Approves First Set of New gTLDs

hypnosec writes "ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has approved the first set of global Top Level Domains (gTLDs) and surprisingly all four are non-English words including . ("Web" in Arabic); . ("Game" in Chinese); . ("Online" in Russian); and . ("Web site" in Russian). Approval of four non-English words can be considered as a milestone and this approval marks "the first time that people will be able to access and type in a website address for generic Top-Level Domains in their native language.""

Comments

Wow, an amazing co-incidence

[jez9999]

surprisingly all four are non-English words including . ("Web" in Arabic); . ("Game" in Chinese); . ("Online" in Russian); and . ("Web site" in Russian).

That's an amazing co-incidence that all those languages use a mere full stop to mean different things!

Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence

[MightyYar]

Since Slashdot sees fit to block those languages, I think I'll take their cue and add Arabic, Russian, and Chinese language urls to my spam filter :)

Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence

[Anonymous Coward]

How deliciously appropriate. Slashcode's truly embarrassingly archaic handling of Unicode finally comes front and center on the front page.

How hard is it to get Unicode support in this code? Seriously, it's freaking blogging software! It's not like you're doing byte-dependent low-level math requiring the exact codepoints of ASCII characters! You're just delivering text over HTTP! What is WRONG with you? Do you guys seriously want to show that as an example of "News for Nerds", or have you seriously finally killed off that byline once and for all because you can't understand something as simple as Unicode?

Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Slashdot sees fit to block those languages, I think I'll take their cue and add Arabic, Russian, and Chinese language urls to my spam filter :)

Won't adding "." to your URL filter block everything?

Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence

[MightyYar]

The hilarious thing is that I can't tell if you typed out unicode characters or not, because this is a very high-tech website.

Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence

[Chris Mattern]

Well, what's the real impetus?

Does having a front-page article shit all over itself because the non-ASCII characters that are the entire point of the article decide not to render count?

Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence

[RyoShin]

Slashdot will never fix their unicode issues. Or their lack of editors who edit. Or their sensationalist and, sometimes, completely wrong summaries. All of that costs time/money and, if they even still cared about value over money while owned by GeekNet, they certainly don't now that they're owned by Dice.

IMHO, Slashdot is dead as a proper "nerd news" site, and has been for some time. Unfortunately, I've yet to find a site (nerd or otherwise) that has the same comment moderation system (which is still the best one, in my opinion, though not without its flaws) and a large, informative/funny/insightful community. Slashdot still enjoys popularity thanks to its community, which is always more worthwhile than the summaries, which almost seems like a catch-22 setup. At least, it's the only reason I'm still here.

Perhaps it would be worthwhile for the comments for this story to be hijacked and used to suggest good alternatives to /.?

Re:.microsoft

[ackthpt]

why no .microsoft? I think the company deserves to have it.

They're plateauing. The decline is next. Based upon what I'm deluged with on Facebook these days, you're likely to see .lolcat before you see .microsoft.

Re:Actually a very dumb idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck that, now I can block by TLD!

"Surprising?"

[SirGarlon]

What's surprising about the fact that when ICANN started approving top-level domains that allow Unicode characters, that the first four were from languages that don't use the Latin alphabet? The only surprise to me is that two are Russian and one is Chinese, instead of the other way around.

Re:"Surprising?"

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The honest fellows at the Russian Business Network will need all the TLDs they can get to stay ahead of the blacklists...

Re:"Surprising?"

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Given the nontrivial overlap(in many reasonably common fonts) between Cyrillic and Latin glyphs, and the accompanying opportunities for wacky domain spoofing, Not. Soon. Enough.

All-Cyrillic domains(with the exception of the ones that you could construct purely from characters with serious overlap issues) aren't nearly as threatening; but, given that sprinkling in a few Cyrillic characters will let you construct visually identical(but completely different) URLs for a substantial number of Latin-character domains, I'd be inclined to treat any mixed-alphabet domains as guilty until proven innocent.

Re:Actually a very dumb idea

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The fact that gTLDs are a trademark/typosquatting money grab for registrars isn't exactly news; but why exactly will non-english TLDs require 'more interpreters'?

If you don't do business in a given country or language area at all, just ignore them. If you have some limited interest in keeping the trademark-infringement scammers away, you don't need an interpreter to buy YOURNAME.whatever-incomprehnsible-foreign and have it point to your existing site. If you do do business in a given language area, presumably you already have somebody who is capable of doing the localization.

I think that gTLDs are moronic; but the difference between being moronic and spawning random slum domains that nobody actually wants only in English vs. being moronic and spawning random slum domains that nobody actually wants in multiple languages isn't that large.

If they wanted it

[Sparticus789]

If the world wanted to have control over the internet naming schemes, they should have spent the time, money, and effort to INVENT the internet.

'Murica!

Re:If they wanted it

[Major Ralph]

If I had mod points, you would have them.

We needed to step back, not forward

[ArcadeMan]

We should have ditched the com, net and org and just force everyone to use TLDs according to their countries. Sites like www.ebay.com would be www.ebay.us, etc.

Re:We needed to step back, not forward

[Princeofcups]

We should have ditched the com, net and org and just force everyone to use TLDs according to their countries. Sites like www.ebay.com would be www.ebay.us, etc.

How is that any different? Companies and people are becoming increasingly more international these days. Something more useful would be function, e.g. .store, .blog, .person, etc. The only reason we have the country codes is that each country wanted to control its own primary, for whatever reason. It's time to get national borders out of the internet.

I'd like U+1F4A9 please

[water-and-sewer]

So, if unicode characters are now a legitimate part of website names, I'd like to register a new domain:

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f4a9/index.htm

Imagine all the fun I could have with it: microsoft.pile-of-poo, oracle.pile-of-poo, mostgovernmentrepresentatives.pile-of-poo and so on. It would make blogging so much more satisfying. Who wants to be a dot-com anymore? So 90s. Be poop instead!

Re:I'd like U+1F4A9 please

[dkf]

Hopefully this will push browser makers and web designers to handle UTF-16 surrogate pairs properly.

Don't hold your breath; it's hard to do right without causing other catastrophic problems. (You really don't want to make indexing into a string by character position be an O(n) operation; lots of common operations rely on that not being true, and changing that alters the complexity class of many algorithms in horrible ways.)

Not Quite...

[iCEBaLM]

"the first time that people will be able to access and type in a website address for generic Top-Level Domains in their native language."

My native language is english, I've been able to do this for a long time.

Re:.microsoft

[SJHillman]

We've established the Electronic Frontier Foundation at the edge of Cyberspace to reduce to dark ages after the fall of Microsoft from 30,000 years to a mere 1,000. Wait, wrong Foundation and wrong Empire.

Re:How about something more useful

[Samantha Wright]

Some day it'll be remembered that DARPA was involved in the creation of the internet and people will talk about it like Sauron handing out rings.

it's the end of the web as we know it

[Ralph Spoilsport]

I feel fine.

Oh, believe me, this is a step *deeper*

[Medievalist]

We should have ditched the com, net and org and just force everyone to use TLDs according to their countries. Sites like www.ebay.com would be www.ebay.us, etc.

Corporations are people, remember? And the important ones that buy and sell legislatures like bars of soap are all multinational corporations. They don't have countries.

Re:How do I type this?

[RabidReindeer]

That's rather Amero-centric of you. Would you go to an Arabic language website? If so, you probably have a way to type Arabic characters. Would you go to a Japanese language website? If so, you probably have a way to type Japanese characters. These characters have been allowed in certain parts of the URL for a long time, but never the TLD. What, largely, has changed?

This is a step towards more globalization, which is a good thing for everyone except the people who are on top but unable to take full advantage of being on top (the American middle and lower classes).

No, actually, it's not Amero-centric. It's historo-centric. Just like lawyers are hung up on Latin. What concerns me isn't the language - since to computers all languages are equally gibberish, it's the complexity of the support mechanism. ASCII/EBCDIC were the character sets used to set up the Internet, and support for them (ASCII, at least) is pretty well universal.

Once you're AT a website, I would certainly hope that their data entry facilities are supporting their target audiences, whatever they are in whatever languages/character sets make the users happy. But getting there shouldn't be balkanized. What we have now is a lowest common denominator. What we risk achieving is a World-Wide Web that's so nationalistic that no one will make the effort required to leave home.

Slashdot, always on the cutting edge

[J'raxis]

Nice article summary. Still don't support that 1998 technology called "UTF-8," do ya, Slashdot?

Re:I have an idea

[nullchar]

These are all uncontested applications (except for .sucks) and will all be new gTLDs within the next year or so:

.gripe
.fail
.sucks
.wtf

(Listed in order of application prioritization by ICANN.)

Re:How about something more useful

[CronoCloud]

3 letter TLD's for the Tolkien fans under the sky.
XXX for the porn lords in their halls of gold.

Just had to do it.