International Domains Around the Corner

A while back we mentioned ICANN’s plans to allow an as-of-yet unknown number of new generic TLDs to be created.  Since then, ICANN has backed off on the immediacy of those plans in favor of more public discussion, input, and planning to make sure that the new gTLDs are created in a manner that addresses the concerns of all stakeholders involved.  Companies want to know how they can protect their brands,  and Domain buyers want more options with many good .COM domains taken.

On the other hand, potential new gTLD registry operators don’t want these delays, because the costs for going through the process of creating their gTLD continues to rise as various expenses add up.  The latest guesses have put the application period for gTLDs in the late 2010 range, with the actual release of those gTLDs in 2011.

Latin-Only Domains No More

Meanwhile, an even bigger change that hasn’t gotten the same level of attention the gTLDs have looks like it may be coming soon.  At ICANN’s most recent conference in Seoul, the decision was made to allow international domain names.  Since 2003, ICANN has supported international characters as part of a domain, but not as part of a TLD.  This change, which is potentially an even bigger deal that new gTLDs for the long-term future of the internet, means that non-Latin character domains will become a bigger part of internet structure.  With a good portion of the world using non-Latin based character sets (particularly in Asian regions), this change has significant implications.  For example, to this point, China’s country-specific TLD is .CN, rather than a TLD based in Chinese characters.

This is an interesting development in domains and it’s a little difficult to tell what unforeseen consequences might result, but overall this should be a good change to promote the availability of the internet to more users globally.  A major concern that has been brought up is application compatibility (not to mention keyboard compatibility with Western languages), but for the most part, international domain names should allow for a greater degree of localization of the internet for non-Western language countries.

We’re curious to see how the changes come about as the initial application period opens this month.