China Webmasters .ORG

International domain names are coming. I've covered this briefly before but it is time for an update.

On the 9th of October, ICANN announced the launch of a test internationalised TLD. In short, .test has been translated into 11 languages. TLD is the part of a domain name after the final dot. On the 15th ICANN will open example.test - a single website accessible in a variety of languages. Both example and .test will be translated into the 11 languages.

This is interesting, and not soon enough in my opinion. International domain names are already available. The bit before the dot being internationalised is not unusual, but the bit after the dot, so for example youtube.com and youtube.公司 actually resolve to the same website hasn't been done yet, well not properly.

Background

To understand the current situation properly, we should look at a few examples and understand some of the techy side.

Firstly, the Internet was established when computing power was limited compared to today, bandwidth was tight, processors were slow and the US was pioneering it. Much of the backbone of the Internet was established using technology that could deal with the ASCII character set (abc, 123, etc) and nothing else (they actually deal with a subset of ASCII as some ASCII characters were reserved for special use). No fancy non-English characters, basically.

Since then the Internet has evolved, but part of the core of the system, the domain name resolvers, have not. .com is .com and nothing else, the lookup tables understand nothing other than .com.

There are international domain names. Here's an example in Chinese: 清华大学 (Tsinghua University).

In this, the non-ASCII characters are converted into Punycode, a representation using a subset of ASCII of the international domain name. Punycode is then understood by the rest of the Internet as it is ASCII read simply by machines.

Note in the above the .cn (the TLD) is still in ASCII. Actually .中国 already works, but that is from the PRC taking things into their own hands. At the moment [Chinese language].[English language] works and [Chinese Language].[China (in Chinese)] is a special case. The testing at the moment means [Korean Language].[Japanese Language] domain names should be conceivable. Imagine typing youtube.公司 and getting directed to the same website as youtube.com, without Youtube having to register it. The TLD is translated. Nice.

Some Potential Problems

Different character sets share the same characters. For example, Chinese characters and Japanese Kanji look the same, though at the moment a domain registered in Japanese Kanji would usually be granted an entry as Chinese characters - a result of Japanese and Chinese authorities working together. When purchasing a Chinese domain in simplified characters, the same domain in traditional characters is currently allocated, according to CNNIC policy.

Mixing some character sets could be a big problem. The Roman and Cryllic alphabet share some characters, while their code representation may be different.

There is plenty of opportunity for Phishing which will have to be thought about seriously, but the Internet is taking a big step away from fragmentation into local networks and local infrastructure.