Kewney@large: The dot-squiggle breakthrough

If you have the technical ability to manage a top-level domain, then Icann will give you the right to do it

Imagine that you’re a programmer. You speak Korean, not English, and all your life you’ve never used a Roman alphabet; instead you’ve used characters, ideograms.

Suddenly, you have to get your head around words such as ‘centre’ and ‘double precision’ written in the Roman script.

No, you probably wouldn’t find it easy. And that explains why the naming authority for the internet, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) has decided to adopt a new encoding system for the internet itself, so that domains can be written, and uniquely expressed, in other alphabets. A seminar to explain the new system will be held in Taipei in November.

Of course, websites using other alphabets have been in existence for a while. IE’s ‘View Source’ feature will show that the web pages behind them are, mostly, written in English and in Roman characters.

For the time being, the technorati of China, Malaysia, Japan or Russia will just have to cope with this. It’s their job, as they’re professionals and they’ll get on with it like pros do. But asking your visitors to learn a new alphabet in order to acquire your merchandise - now that’s something else.

A wise marketing man once told me: “You can buy in any language. But if you want to sell, you’d better be persuasive in the customer’s own tongue.” And for people like me, the .com, .net and .org traditions may be obvious and self-explanatory.

But if you’re selling to Korean customers, you would do much better to have a website that is not only Asian sounding, but also uses Asian letters.

And as of next year, that’s exactly what we’re going to have. The first step is the .asia breakthrough.
My first response to these new top-level domains (TLDs) was to suspect the authorities of just “sending round the begging bowl again”.

You know the situation: you’ve got www.superduperthing.com registered and SuperDuperThing® trademarked.

Next you have to fork out for superduperthing.co.uk, .tv and dot-every-other-country, and then there is .eu for Europe… what a transparent scam (I thought).

It turns out that there is no real problem to letting your trademark .eu go to someone else; if either your business is so big it’s a drop in the budgetary ocean, or everybody knows that you have a .com domain anyway.

But there really are people who want to be justme@bobbloggs.eu and the demand was spectacular enough when TLDs were launched.

And the demand for something like justme@kimilsung.asia is many times greater than this.
As I asked my contact inside Icann, why do we have to have all these TLDs? It does leave you wondering. What’s wrong with www.Ilike.fish as a URL?

“Nothing at all,” my contact said. He added that by this time next year, if you have the technical ability to manage a domain, Icann will give you the rights to it. For example, if coffee growers decide they want to own and operate .coffee it will do a deal.

But it’s the Asian activity, he said, that will occupy Icann’s corporate attention for the foreseeable future. He said: “The interesting stuff on the web is all happening in Asia. They are really enthusiastic, and particularly the Koreans, who are leaning on Icann very hard to make the web accessible to people who don’t understand our alphabet.”

I tried to get to grips with the encoding system that ensures a sequence of three Chinese ideograms will resolve uniquely into an Ascii text sequence that won’t accidentally be parsed as something unspeakably rude in English. I failed.

Frankly, UTF-8 is baffling enough for me… but the “dot-squiggle domainiverse“ is a done deal, is being tested right now and will be live before this year’s Christmas presents are a year old.

Now that just leaves the problem of how to code Pascal in Korean glyphs.