The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will speed development of country-coded top-level domains and local-language scripting, the group announced Wednesday at the Internet Governance Forum in Rio de Janeiro.ICANN, the worldwide nonprofit organization that regulates the Internet's domain name system, or DNS, has launched its campaign to provide internationalized country code top-level domains, or ccTLDs--those that don't use Latin characters--as soon as possible with the help of the Country Code Names Supporting Organization, an ICANN policy development body for ccTLD issues.
ICANN Wants To Speed Up Internationalized Domain Name Development [news.com]
I wonder if in retrospect this "ho-hum, nothing much happened today" moment will prove to be a date that will go down in history as a tide change?
The DotComWorld: "What's the big deal? We don't need no stinkin IDNs!"
The LargerWorld: "Hello? There's about 2 billion of us and we're moving onine en masse.
Or maybe it's just that we've become so cynical or indifferent to news coming from ICANN? I haven't seen too many happy reviews, 'cept maybe from certain registries that were given the green light to raise their profits . . err fees . . and the domain taster-kiters who've had their way with ICANN for 2 years or more . .
ICANN: Do we care?
WE: ICANN, do WE care?
Seems the ICANN dialogue only livens up when, as Mario Puzo put in in the book "The Godfather", "we're goin' to the mattresses". (Heading for a shoot-out for control of the business.)
[edited by: Webwork at 7:11 pm (utc) on Nov. 17, 2007]
Most people these days find sites using search engines using keywords, rather than type domain name in location bar (unless it is very short and popular, ie: google.com), there is absolutely no serious need to introduce such domains, but registries certainly want to increase their sales.
If ICANN doesn't sort it out, it's possible that certain areas of the world would go it alone.
Already here locally the Japan post office has launched a campaign for their New Years Post Card service which is only advertised using the IDN domain. As time goes on younger entrepreneurs might not have the option of getting a simple ASCII dot com(too expensive & already gone), these present a choice for future businesses.
This might be part of a process. Chinese is a much more efficient language for data processing. Most words are represented by one or two characters, and all characters are represented by two bytes. Also there are no spaces between characters so no bytes are wasted to represent the spaces, and text wraps at the character level. The result is a chunk of Chinese text consists of far fewer bytes, is less of a load on the network, and can be displayed on a hand-held device usually without having to scroll. At a guess a text message or web page in Chinese can be read by about two billion people.
