Wall Street Journal - "Web Alphabet Set To Change."

[stbmax]

Wall Street Journal - "Web Alphabet Set To Change."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1256...LEFTTopStories

Also CNN News:
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/BUSINESS...ain/index.html

[bwhhisc]

Wall Street Journal - "Web Alphabet Set To Change."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1256...LEFTTopStories

Also CNN News:
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/BUSINESS...ain/index.html

Web Alphabet Set to Change

SEOUL -- The World Wide Web is about to start using the languages of the world.

Leaders of the private body that oversees the basic design of the Internet are expected to decide at a meeting here Friday to let Web addresses be expressed in characters other than those of the Roman alphabet. Already, portions of a Web address can be written in other languages. But the suffix, such as the "com" after the dot, must be typed in Roman letters. The change will allow the suffix -- known as a top-level domain in the architecture of the Internet -- to be expressed in 17 other alphabets. They include traditional and simplified Chinese characters, Russian Cyrillic, Korean Hangul and Hebrew. Dozens of other alphabets are likely to be added in coming years.

That means computer users will be able to type or input a full Web address without the need for Roman letters. Web site designers will be able to use a consistent character set on a Web page without, for instance, having to resort to Roman letters to portray a link to another page. Authorities who oversee top-level domains in their home countries could begin accepting applications next month. Making it happen has taken six years of discussion by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, and technical work by the Internet Engineering Task Force, both independent non-profit organizations that endeavor to preserve the universality of the data network, which got started as an offshoot of a U.S. military network in the 1960s. "The statistics show that over half of the users of the Internet today don't use the Roman alphabet in their first language," says Rod Beckstrom, chief executive of Icann. "It's an issue of national pride in some cases and cultural identity."

Icann's directors and advisors are meeting in Seoul this week to wrestle with some of the final technical issues. The thorniest is what to do with characters that look the same but mean something different, which is particularly difficult with Chinese, the language that may someday be one of the most heavily used for Internet addresses. "The program is very likely to get approved as a whole," Mr. Beckstrom says. "There are simply details that are being negotiated." In China, Web sites generally use roman letters to spell Chinese words out in the Hanyu Pinyin system, the Western alphabet transliteration of Chinese characters. But the system has also led to some domain names that are a series of numbers that rhyme with Chinese words. Peter Lu, managing director of China IntelliConsulting, said the change will boost Web use in China. Switching from Chinese characters at the start of an address to Roman characters for the ".com" or the ".gov" is cumbersome. But he said it would have made a bigger difference 10 years ago when Internet usage was starting out in the country. "Now, more and more Chinese know English or at least, are used to using Pinyin as a substitute," he said.

Elsewhere, the importance of the change in Web addresses may depend on how much people type out an address versus finding it from a search engine or portal service. South Korean Web users, for instance, rely heavily on two portal companies that allow Korean-language searches and present not just Web sites but news, videos and other content from a single request. "I think the decision is unlikely to bring about huge changes for users," says Lee Wang-sang, an Internet analyst at Woori Securities in Seoul. "But there will be some competition between companies to obtain popular Korean words for addresses."

—Sue Feng in Beijing contributed to this article
Write to Evan Ramstad at evan.ramstad@wsj.com

[HarrisonJ]

Sounds interesting. I wonder what this will do to domain name prices, probably just make Roman alphabet domain names more valuable. Good way to divide the world even more!

[Rubber Duck]

Sounds interesting. I wonder what this will do to domain name prices, probably just make Roman alphabet domain names more valuable. Good way to divide the world even more!

The web is already divided and mostly by ignorance. Does having an "English" domain name make it any easier for you to read a site in Simplified Chinese or Arabic? I think not!

The point is there are whole alternative market places out there which most Americans automatically assumed they would have access to even without creating bespoke local content. This will simply demonstrate how naive and stupid they are. It doesn't actually change anything.

[DomainsInc]

The web is already divided and mostly by ignorance. Does having an "English" domain name make it any easier for you to read a site in Simplified Chinese or Arabic? I think not!

The point is there are whole alternative market places out there which most Americans automatically assumed they would have access to even without creating bespoke local content. This will simply demonstrate how naive and stupid they are. It doesn't actually change anything.

I think its great. There is a whole world out there and I simply can't speak the language and have no time to learn (or much interest). Although they will have an uphill battle at first. They will need to develop their own advertising methods as the PPC for most countries that will be impacted by this are very poor. I know in adult most of these countries just get redirected elsewhere because they typically don't have credit cards and often times there is a high number of fraud transactions from certain countries.

[nameslave]

I think its great. There is a whole world out there and I simply can't speak the language and have no time to learn (or much interest). Although they will have an uphill battle at first. They will need to develop their own advertising methods as the PPC for most countries that will be impacted by this are very poor. I know in adult most of these countries just get redirected elsewhere because they typically don't have credit cards and often times there is a high number of fraud transactions from certain countries.

I actually learned that (there's a whole non-English speaking world out there) when I visited Germany (still West Germany back then) almost 20 years ago. I stood in the middle of a busy city (Hamburg), fully embraced by an advanced industrial state; but when I looked at the signs, I could not read a word or even guess their meaning (as in French).

By the way, I'm glad that the IDN FINALLY gets to a point where it FULLY goes international ... or local.

[INVIGOR]

I think the VAST, VAST majority of people will still remember the king of all tlds, .com.

How many of us actually know how to type a character with a grave, acute, circumflex, tilde, diaeresis, ring, ligature, or cedilla, etc, and how many of us will actually use it as an extension.

I have to agree that this will only strengthen traditional tlds, especially .coms.

[Rubber Duck]

I think the VAST, VAST majority of people will still remember the king of all tlds, .com.

How many of us actually know how to type a character with a grave, acute, circumflex, tilde, diaeresis, ring, ligature, or cedilla, etc, and how many of us will actually use it as an extension.

I have to agree that this will only strengthen traditional tlds, especially .coms.

Which is why I invested in IDN.com. They can all remember dot Com, they just have problems trying to remember somebody else's language.

[nameslave]

I think the VAST, VAST majority of people will still remember the king of all tlds, .com.

How many of us actually know how to type a character with a grave, acute, circumflex, tilde, diaeresis, ring, ligature, or cedilla, etc, and how many of us will actually use it as an extension.

I have to agree that this will only strengthen traditional tlds, especially .coms.

Now, THAT is the question. The truth is, ALMOST ALL computer users in those countries (from Russia to China) know VERY WELL how to do that. And guess what, there are probably more computer users in e.g. China than the whole US population.

To be honest, and even as a .COM disciple myself, I don't see how this could make .COM *stronger*.

[Rubber Duck]

Now, THAT is the question. The truth is, ALMOST ALL computer users in those countries (from Russia to China) know VERY WELL how to do that. And guess what, there are probably more computer users in e.g. China than the whole US population.

To be honest, and even as a .COM disciple myself, I don't see how this could make .COM *stronger*.

Dot Com is about to morph into a variety of different forms. They won't look like dot com but they will walk and talk like dot coms and they will resolve to the dot com registry, just not quite yet.

If you follow developments at ICANN they are now talking about an IDN gTLD Fastrack. What are they talking about and who do you think is doing the talking?

[tekz999]

Am I going to be the next Rick Schwartz for owning some good IDNs .coms?

[PokerPie]

Am I going to be the next Rick Schwartz for owning some good IDNs .coms?

I was thinking this would make the IDN's worthless.

I think the next Rick Schwartz's are going to be the people who get ahold of the good domains in other languages. Sign me up for poker, casino and sex in every language!

[Yaffiliate]

Could someone explain is this replacing IDN's (ie what PokerPie was saying) or just unifying the way they will display and offering full support to IDN's?

[INVIGOR]

READ! IDN's use special characters in FRONT of the . DOT! This will allow special characters AFTER the . DOT! Completely different than iDN's.

Don't feel bad, I was confused until I read it again and understood what it was, and the impact. I still think it just serves to strengthen .coms.

In general Russians don't speak Chinese, don't speak Hebrew, Arabic or Korean...THEY ALL SPEAK .COM no matter what you put in front of it.

[BobDiGiTaL]

latona spoke about this in new orleans.

basically دوت.com's will be useless, because no one will use the .com extension(roman) in those counties anymore.

people will use دوت.دوت

[mulligan]

It gives me a warm glowing feeling to see so many (Western centric, ASCII using people) are totally ignorant of what is about to happen with regards to IDNs. Love it!

[kevmacmeh]

this story is on the homepage of bbc.co.uk

[PokerPie]

Also in the top news on Yahoo Finance

[Wot]

It gives me a warm glowing feeling to see so many (Western centric, ASCII using people) are totally ignorant of what is about to happen with regards to IDNs. Love it!

Although the boat left the jetty some time ago I am still amazed, and thankful, that the majority of the domaining community still have not even found the jetty.

[Rubber Duck]

latona spoke about this in new orleans.

basically دوت.com's will be useless, because no one will use the .com extension(roman) in those counties anymore.

people will use دوت.دوت

May be but did he tell you who gets to own the دوت.دوت?

The answer to that is effectively already in the policy, but nobody is yet spelling it out clearly.

دوت.com will not be useless even if it is not much used directly, as that will be the foundation stone for all the Dot com variants that follow subsequently and will eventually be aliased to it. There are NOT going to 150 different dot Com registries all run by different organizations. There IS going to be a single dot com registry but different manifestations of the same extension. So most of these won't be domains but Virtual Domains, as they won't have an independent existence.

I have got nothing against Rick Latona, but this guy only saw the light a few months back. I would not describe him as an authority on the subject, and to be fair I am not sure that he would either.