Will New Internet Domain Names Change the Web? | Hacker News Reader

Will New Internet Domain Names Change the Web?

pcworld.com

9 pointsnewacc16 comments

oh please, like we are supposed to believe ICANN cares about internalization. The only reason they want to do this, is to make more money off the fees from the idiots who'll buy these crappy domains.

We've seen hundreds of TLDs launched that were touted as game changers. .info, .biz, .us, and those are the big ones, and noone wants them. .COM is king, it is ingrained in internet users worldwide.

Yes local countries have their .rus and .chs but that's the whole point. The QWERTY keyboard is the standard worldwide.

Trying to bypass that, just reeks of opportunism

You'd be surprised. I'd say the vast majority of URLs I see around in Japan end in .jp. Hitting ctrl+enter after an URL will add www and .co.jp on most computers, not .com. Few people understand english sufficiently to browse the english-speaking internet; the best example is probably Facebook, which is rarely used here, while its local equivalent mixi.jp is extremely popular.

Also, the QWERTY keyboard is just not the standard worldwide...

That being said, I don't think people will start using japanese URLs much. The alphabet + .jp is already ingrained and more convenient. Also, most phones will refuse japanese characters in an email adress and perhaps in an URL, which is a game breaker here.

Facebook has extraordinarily good localizations, done primarily by their active users: http://www.facebook.com/translations/

Japaneses tastes are quite different when it comes to design, anonymity, and personal privacy -- and the divergent social network doesn't help anything.

Hey, hey! Don't be putting down .info. It brought about millions of spam sites!

> The QWERTY keyboard is the standard worldwide.

Try telling that to a frenchman.

Internationalizing the domains names is utterly pointless. Most keyboards in the world are in latin, which means that people who use a different alphabet have to switch keyboard mode. It's just not convenient. Imagine this:

  > goole.com
  > Alt-Shift-Win (to switch)
  > говедо.ком
  > Alt-Shift-Win (switch back)

Bah ... bulshit.

Why do you think that Google woudn't register something like гугл.рф? I think it's for folks from the pure rural areas who don't know the latin alphabet at all. They have a right to use computers and the internet too.

But... the keyboards.

You're missing the point. The folks in the rural areas won't be able to use a computer in the first place, because the keyboards are in latin. I've never seen a Cyrillic or Arabic keyboard.

Every keyboard sold in Russia has both latin and cyrillic letters on it.

...and newer Windows default on the local (i.e. cyrillic) layout.

Some clueless linux distros even install cyrillic layout as the only one; which is completely unusable of course.

I thought this ICANN decision just opened the way for internationalized TLDs, and that the rest of the domain name was already internationalized. Thanks to anyone who can help clarify this.

I answered myself on this other thread. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=913284

Every other part of the URL including the rest of the domain name can already be Unicode encoded. This is how spoofing attacks are formed by using non-Latin characters in domain names that look like the Latin characters they replace.

This latest ICANN decision doesn't seem to make anything less convenient for the English speaking world than it already was.

Yeah, this is the biggest problem with the proposed change to URLs. When you can have two different characters that are visually identical but have different meaning to computers, you have a serious security problem.

I call ಠ_ಠ.com

That was already feasible, this news is about punycoding of the TLD, punycode in the non-TLD portion was already allowed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com