The New Internet Domain Names

Posted on October 31, 2009 Updated on November 1, 2009

What do you think of the idea of having internet domain names written in other non-ASCII character sets such as Chinese, Russian, Arabic, etc? It would definitely make the World Wide Web made for the world now instead of just made for the English-speaking people. People won’t be forced to learn English now when using the web because websites can be made in their own language or characters.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) made this decision which they herald as the biggest technical change to the Internet since its birth. The Internet and email addresses could be in each country’s own language now. The problem that arises however is how are we able to access all these websites if we don’t have a keyboard that supports all the character sets. I guess you wouldn’t really need to go to all those websites now, would you? If a particular website wanted people speaking other languages to visit their website, then they’d probably have an alternate domain name and a fully-translated site.

Is this a good thing? I guess so because this makes the World Wide Web more diversified. If every website wanted to have a domain name in all the character sets available, then this also means more public IP addresses will need to be used. This makes the IPv6 definitely useful then.

Related Article: PC World – Will New Internet Domain Names Change the Web?

Photo Credit: altemark