First New Top-Level Domains Added To the Root Zone

angry tapir writes "The Internet – or at least its namespace – just got bigger. Four new top-level domains have been added to the Internet's root zone. The four new gTLDs all use non-Latin scripts: 'web' in Arabic, 'online' in Cyrillic, 'sale' in Cyrillic, and 'game' in Chinese. In total, the generic top-level domain process run by ICANN will result in the expansion of top-level domains from 22 to up to 1400."

Comments

Phishing

[sbrown7792]

And phishers everywhere rejoiced

Cyrillic is not a language

[necro81]

Cyrillic is an alphabet or script; it is not a language. The TLDs written in Cyrillic, when translated into Russian (the most abundant language to use the Cyrillic script) are "online" and "sale".

Re:Cyrillic is not a language

[rxmd]

Actually no. This is just the English words "online" and "site" (not "sale") transliterated into the Cyrillic script. A lot of languages that are written in the Cyrillic alphabet use "online" and "site" as loan words from English, the new TLDs will fit all of them.

Re:Cyrillic is not a language

[kharchenko]

Actually, the second one is "site", not "sale". The ludicrous thing is that neither word is actually russian - they are simply transliterations of the english "online" and "site" words in cyrillic.

Re:Cyrillic is not a language

[mi]

Although could you tell me the Russian equivalents of the English "Online" and "Site"?

There really aren't (single-word) equivalents, which is why the English words are now so widely used for the purpose even by the purists and the anti-Americans (of whom there are very many among Russians nowadays)...

The best I can come up with would be "na linii" ("on line") and "mesto" ("place"), but neither are quite exact a match for the English terms...

Re:Cyrillic is not a language

[nullchar]

In China, CNNIC manages .cn in ASCII for their country code top level domain (ccTLD). They also manage .xn--fiqs8s (simplified) and .xn--fiqz9s (traditional) for ".china" in Chinese.

When you purchase a domain under .xn--fiqs8s, you get the same string in .xn--fiqz9s. This is referred to as "IDN Bundling". DNS resolves for both, but you only have to manage one domain.

It's yet to be seen what the New gTLDs will do for Chinese simplified vs traditional. Most likely, they will only accept simplified characters (to keep it simple!) but they could do bundling.

Re:Google Translator compatible?

[Chrisq]

These new domains seem to split the internet, unless the pages can be read by the English speaking world. Maybe that's the idea, but it seems to move away from the intent of a universal internet.

Right now there are many millions of websites I can't read because I don't speak Chinese, Korean, Russian, etc. etc. etc.... There can be no "universal Internet" unless everyone speaks the same language, which is never going to happen.

Not to mention there are many in English that I don't understand; on genetic sequencing, quantum effects, plasma physics, etc.

Re:It's "site", not "sale"

[Fnordulicious]

Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters in ISO 8859-1.

Look-alikes

[rabtech]

Does anyone know if they handle the look-alike issue or are we still stuck with URLs that appear to be latin "paypal.com", but with the "y" replaced by a greek lower gamma (Î) #x3b3, "p" replaced with cyrillic Er (Ñ) #x440, or some other equivalent that appears identical?

I understand why it's a hard issue: the cyrillic lowercase Er looks *identical* to latin p so they can be mapped to the same character, but the greek lower gamma isn't the exact same glyph as latin lower y, they just look close enough that a user might not notice. Would it be a slight to greek users to force greek domain names to use a misshapen lower gamma? Then what do you do with greek alpha, where the capital matches the latin glyph exactly but the lower does not?

Then there's the issue that every computer everywhere can enter latin characters, but not everyone has software for or how to use stuff like Chinese characters or Japanese Hirigana. Keeping to basic latin characters makes entering domain names universal, though I understand why that's convenient for an English speaker like me to say. I'd be curious to hear from some people who have non-European first languages how much having to use latin domain names seems to bother the average computer user and whether there is any actual cry for international domain names in their country? How difficult/easy is it to enter latin characters on your keyboard layout? Does it present a barrier to entry for the less educated/literate, or does everyone remember their English classes from school?