DaddyHalbucks said:
Dave,
The bottom line: your belief that IDNs are the new .COM is a THEORY.
In general, the burden of proof for a theory is on the person who posits the theory. It is not the world's burden to prove the theory is wrong. It is the person's job to prove the theory is RIGHT.
Therefore, you need to prove that your theory is correct, which I don't believe has been done. It is not enough to say "IDNs are early stage, just like .COMs were a decade ago, and therefore IDNs are the next .COMs."
You need to show us WHY. Especially, you need to show why IDNs are superior to .COMs and why they will replace .COMs.
Daddy,
There seem to be a few misconceptions here. Most of my IDN are dot coms (the remainder are dot nets), they are part of the same registry and go through the DNS in exactly the same way. All that is different is that they don't make much sense in the browser until decoded. Soon this will happen so seemlessly most users will be oblivious to the process.
It has never been suggested that IDN would replace dot coms. It is merely an extension of choice to the 90% of people who been excluded by the Anglo-Centric nature of the internet. Most Americans are never going to require IDNs as the English Language doesn't require them. On the face of things neither do most of the European Languages, but it has not stopped them becoming very popular in Germany, where only a handful of characters need IDN for them to be represented.
The poor Chinese have been so restricted by the original DNS that many of their top sites are still represented by Numbers rather than Words. Only a marginal improvement on using IP addresses. OK, we are all capable of remembering a few of them, but as Chinese Internet addresses proliferate, is it not concievable that they might like to represent the site addresses using language rather than numerical indexing? Surely, that is what the DNS was invented for?
It is of fundamental importance that domains reflect keyword searches in search engines or at least the characters people can readily input from their keyboards, or whatever other input device they may have. If somebody searches for say "computer" by inputting the Chinese equivalent, it is pretty unlikely that those characters are going to be translated into English by the search and then throw up the relevant site with the right keywords in the URL. English dot coms will therefore be pretty much useless in attracting Chinese traffic to a site. Chinese type in will almost never end up at a site with an English URL. In short Romanic dot coms are fine for the purpose for which they were designed and will continue to function adequately for that purpose. However, with the broadening of the Client base the specification requirement are now much wider. The need for Multilingual Keywords and Domains is difficult to refute, it just a question of implementation and adoption.
It is because I believe in the strength of the dot com brand and because of the economics of buying dot com IDN, that I have gone down this route rather than investing in ccTLD IDNs, which of course will also have their place, but may not provide such a Bonanza.
Best Regards
Dave Wrixon
Mr. Deleted said:
I don't agree that they will replace, at any rate, the .com. But some may be successful in those countries that use those letters.
This comment suggests that you don't have the foggiest idea what you are talking about.
Dave Wrixon
DigitalChanges said:
well said Daddy,.............
.com will always be king!!
:wink:
Well of course it will, dot com IDN will outsell all other IDN extensions!
Best Regards
Dave Wrixon