ICANN To Introduce New TLDs By Mid 2008

[engine]

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which manages the Internet's domain-name address system, said on Friday it was on track to allow an expanded number of domain names next year.

ICANN officials, wrapping up a week-long meeting in Puerto Rico, said their goal was to have in place by next year a permanent process to allow for new, generic top-level domain names, as well as to begin "internationalizing" domain names.

ICANN To Introduce New TLDs By Mid 2008
[uk.reuters.com]

[edited by: engine at 11:29 am (utc) on July 2, 2007]

[Marcia]

Thread on it from a while back, when first considered:

New Domains Possible mid-2008 [webmasterworld.com]

Any definite word yet which ones?

[skibum]

Well as long as they come out with the .museum everyone should be happy. Why do we need more TLDs?

[Marcia]

>Why do we need more TLDs?

Because the domainers have a good lobby going with ICANN.

[klown]

It looks like the next big thing will be expanding addresses to allow foreign characters.

For example if they add in full support for Simplified Chinese Characters there are around 4000 commonly used characters as opposed to our current 26 letters.

[bill]

International domain names have been around since the late 90s. We've had Chinese, Japanese and Korean domain names available for several years now. The problems have always been application support. Browsers in particular have only recently become IDN compatible without the need of additional plug-in software.

[Marcia]

I just today discovered that there are also city domains - and unfortunately some are using site names that are trademarked in the US, but not in that city.

[RonPK]

foreign characters

Let me guess: you're in the USA?

[DrDoc]

foreign characters

Let me guess: you're in the USA?

In many countries, domains with foreign characters have been around a lot longer than others ...

Israel, Russia, China, and Egypt -- just to mention a few -- have all had support for domain names with foreign characters since, well, "da thing" started ... going on 30 some years now.