Dawn of Chinese domain names

Top-level Internet domain names will soon include Chinese characters after the body that oversees their assignment approved the proposal last week.

While Chinese characters have long been allowed in domain names, until now only Latin characters were permitted after the final dot.

The web will be more accessible for Chinese netizens after the use of Chinese top-level domain names was approved. Illustrated by Jiao Shu

Chinese characters accepted

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the California-based corporation that manages domain names and IP addresses, agreed in a meeting July 12 to start using Chinese characters for suffixes handed out by Chinese mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan-based Internet registrars. It started allowing Arabic earlier this year.

“This approval is a significant change for Chinese language users worldwide,” said Rod Beckstrom, president and chief executive officer of ICANN. “One-fifth of the world speaks Chinese and that means we just increased the potential online accessibility for roughly a billion people.”

This is the second step in the adoption of international domain names (IDN) after a long debate over their introduction. While domain names written in non-Latin script may be great for local markets, they may create big problems for the Web at large.

The first three IDNs went live a couple of months ago for Arabic-speaking Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. 

(Agencies)