ICANN, the governing body of
domain names, says it will test out web addresses using Arabic, Persian, Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Hebrew, Japanese, Tamil and both simplified and traditional Chinese. I guess this means that the inevitable collapse of all language into a bloated English hodgepodge is on hold. While it's nice for people to get domain names they can actually read, it pisses me off, because I like navigating non-English sites by their forced use of Roman-alphabet tags. Ironically, as machine translation gets better, the use of more and more languages and alphabets on the web might not really detract from its universality. But I can't help thinking there's something scary in this decision, scary, that is, for monolingual America. [
Yahoo/AFP]
Gizmodo
ICANN has just made a decision that goes beyond allowing .xxx to be a top level domain; they're allowing all words to be top level domains. That means you're going to see domains like fuck.shit, shit.shit, shit.fuck, whatisthisshit.fuck, and so forth. What's not allowed is domains that conflict with trademarks (.pepsi was the example), too similar to current top level domains, or names associated with countries or governments (juicy.turkey). Companies will also register their products and services, leading to really annoying domains like pleaseplayyour.ps3pleaseplease, or dontyouwantanother.ipod. Nice one, ICANN. Nice one. [USA Today]
