Internationalized Domain Name – The Road Ahead

Call it cultural hegemony, call it digital monopoly. Why can there only be 26 roman characters variant in a domain name?

Well, not anymore. It’s now possible for every language in this world to have domain names of their own language, thanks to Internationalized Domain Name (IDN). Mobinode probably can have one called 动点博客.com (Mobinode in Chinese, obviously)

Yes, it’s doable technologically, but is it feasible economically? Traditionally, Chinese domains have resorted to numbers, pinyin or real simple-sounding English words as their domain name of choice. This is simply because it’s too risky to get the names wrong. Not that anyone will spell “Google” as “Gogle” or “Googe”, but having 谷歌.com definitely helps.

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