ICANN also moves forward its internationalized domains. Look forward to .測試 in 2009!

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/062608-board-opens-way-for-new.html

by ROFISH • 18 years ago

4 4 18 years ago

ROFISH• 18 years ago

I bring this up since this news seems to be drowned because of custom TLDs. If you're looking to target an internationalized audience in 2009, make sure you realize that domain names are no longer limited to lower ASCII now.

For more information, check out: http://idn.icann.org/ . They already have some test domains to try out.

jws• 18 years ago

Forget native scripts, I lust for dingbat domains. How about http://xn--y3h.com ? Oh look, it is already being squatted.

Darn it, now I'll need to waste an hour trying to register pretty but untypeable domains. Curse you hacker news.

mechanical_fish• 18 years ago

I presume those are the Mandarin characters for "phisher heaven"?

Which makes me wonder what the Chinese equivalent of ".com" is. Hopeless American that I am, it hadn't yet occurred to me that the ICANN decision has very different implications if your native language is not English. Have the Chinese (or the Turks, or the Russians, or Language Group X) been anxiously awaiting this moment?

ryanmahoski• 18 years ago

测试 is chinese for "test." As of Oct 2007, http://example.test works -- not in english but in chinese (http://例子.测试/) as well as in a dozen other languages. Hat tip to @rofish for pointing this out.

     What is the Chinese equivalent of .com?

It depends on what you mean: the dictionary translation in chinese characters or the brand equivalent. Dot com is the strongest domain in China.

The lexical translation of com to any language is hard because com isn't really a word in English, it's better thought of in terms of a brand. (What is Nike in French?) Com roughly means "internet commercial business" but of course no English speaker would ever say that -- they'd say "dot com." So you can go to Google Translate and plug in "business," "commercial business," "com" or whatever and get back stuff like 商务 and 商业. And those are good translations but they're not going to be the vernacular equivalent of .com. As far as I know, when a Chinese person thinks about dot coms, he thinks about and writes them just as we do (i.e., ".com").

In terms of brand, .com is king although .cn is gaining in China. Cn began in 2003 and is already the 4th largest TLD in the world. The wholesale price for a .cn today is just 1 yuan ($0.15 USD). Spammers love them.

A couple years ago, ICANN started selling second-level international domains. So wise investors (like idnoptions.com) have been buying up chinese.latins (eg, 中.com). Chinese.latin is the clear trend in China because pinyin (romanization of chinese characters) isn't nearly as intuitive to type as are chinese characters. If there is a problem with these hybrid domains, it is that they're still a language compromise: currently there are no international gTLDs to be had.

But ICANN essentially fixed the problem this week, voting to open the unicode floodgates. Dot com will continue to rule China for several years but new Chinese gTLDs will close in on .com's market share. Arabic, Japanese, Korean and others will enjoy the same opportunities. You're right, this is really a celebration for unicode (international characters), not so much a heyday for Latin based languages.

The perfect TLD is probably a dot chinese character. Over a billion people understand written Chinese -- double that of English. You mentioned Mandarin, which numbers 850 million fluent speakers (compare with 350 million for English). Although Mandarin is the official spoken language of China, written Chinese is understood by far more people than just those who speak Mandarin. The brand opportunity for a capitalized Chinese gTLD with local leverage is huge.

Most street estimates have ICANN receiving between 50 and 500 gTLD applications in the first year. (Since ICANN has not yet announced their rules or pricing model, speculation runs amuck.) That estimate is based on several WAGs, including an application fee of $100k-$300k and an annual price speculated to be around $10k-$50k.

What is the business plan of a gTLD? Just because current assets can handle a few years' rent on something cool does not mean the expense is justified. Will Apple Inc. buy .apple so it doesn't go the Washington Apple Growers Association or the Give a Teacher an Apple society? An eBay official at the Paris meeting carefully spoke about the possibility of eBay buying .ebay. The average Fortune 500 company already spends ~$500k in domain protection annually (an estimate quoted by one ICANN board member on Tuesday to which another responded was "hugely low"). But there are loftier goals than buying your own brand just so you can hoard it. What, apart from "be a registrar," is a viable business model?

ICANN isn't answering questions like "Can I buy a vowel?" If you want to apply for .i (or whatever), you need a rock-solid business plan. The reason is, ICANN doesn't want the bad press that comes with having to shut down a popular gTLD and all its subdomains. Imagine if you owned the rights to .org; you can't, but if you could and you did and then you went bankrupt, ICANN would have to shut down all your subdomains -- Wikipedia, etc. Huge headache. We're talking, for a popular gTLD, entire markets tumbling. At some point, ICANN can't be held responsible for controlling damages but they have said they will require all gTLD applicants to present a business plan. So if your gTLD isn't solvent, you had better go back to the drawing board. Otherwise you'll be out 6 figures in application fees with nothing to show for it. (I presume ICANN will make the rules predictive so you'll know in advance if you'd eligible.)

Buyer beware if you plan to build on top of one of these new gTLDs. What guarantees do you have that next year your parent brand will still be around? Will anyone ever recognize your parent brand? Maybe the rational thing to do is ignore the hype and start treating domains as they structurally are: decoration. Of course if we did that we'd have to focus on hacking and making stuff people actually want.

ICANN also moves forward its internationalized domains. Look forward to .測試 in 2009!

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