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Networking The Internet IT

First New Top-Level Domains Added To the Root Zone 106

Posted by timothy from the dibs-on-linear-b dept.
angry tapir writes "The Internet – or at least its namespace – just got bigger. Four new top-level domains have been added to the Internet's root zone. The four new gTLDs all use non-Latin scripts: 'web' in Arabic, 'online' in Cyrillic, 'sale' in Cyrillic, and 'game' in Chinese. In total, the generic top-level domain process run by ICANN will result in the expansion of top-level domains from 22 to up to 1400."
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First New Top-Level Domains Added To the Root Zone More

First New Top-Level Domains Added To the Root Zone

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  • Phishing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sbrown7792 ( 2027476 ) on Thursday October 24, 2013 @07:55AM (#45222215)
    And phishers everywhere rejoiced

  • Cyrillic is not a language (Score:5, Informative)

    by necro81 ( 917438 ) on Thursday October 24, 2013 @07:55AM (#45222217) Journal
    Cyrillic is an alphabet or script; it is not a language. The TLDs written in Cyrillic, when translated into Russian (the most abundant language to use the Cyrillic script) are "online" and "sale".

    • Re:Cyrillic is not a language (Score:5, Informative)

      by rxmd ( 205533 ) on Thursday October 24, 2013 @08:09AM (#45222321) Homepage

      Actually no. This is just the English words "online" and "site" (not "sale") transliterated into the Cyrillic script. A lot of languages that are written in the Cyrillic alphabet use "online" and "site" as loan words from English, the new TLDs will fit all of them.

      • The Chinese one has a similar/opposite sort of problem: The same word can be written in traditional or simplified script, in either of two main encoding schemes on the local computer (Big5 and GB, respectively) while unicode is often used for internet (there are others too). I assume unicode is used for the TLD, but I wonder how the simplified/traditional problem gets handled. I would assume it defaults to simplified, but I'm curious how those with traditional systems are supposed to interface with it.

        • Re:Cyrillic is not a language (Score:4, Informative)

          by nullchar ( 446050 ) on Thursday October 24, 2013 @12:01PM (#45225381)

          In China, CNNIC manages .cn in ASCII for their country code top level domain (ccTLD). They also manage .xn--fiqs8s (simplified) and .xn--fiqz9s (traditional) for ".china" in Chinese.

          When you purchase a domain under .xn--fiqs8s, you get the same string in .xn--fiqz9s. This is referred to as "IDN Bundling". DNS resolves for both, but you only have to manage one domain.

          It's yet to be seen what the New gTLDs will do for Chinese simplified vs traditional. Most likely, they will only accept simplified characters (to keep it simple!) but they could do bundling.

    • Re:Cyrillic is not a language (Score:5, Informative)

      by kharchenko ( 303729 ) on Thursday October 24, 2013 @08:14AM (#45222365)

      Actually, the second one is "site", not "sale". The ludicrous thing is that neither word is actually russian - they are simply transliterations of the english "online" and "site" words in cyrillic.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by sageres ( 561626 )
        Hi Friend, I myself find it a bit ludicrous the amount of Rusglish in modern Russian Although could you tell me the Russian equivalents of the English "Online" and "Site"?

        • Re:Cyrillic is not a language (Score:4, Informative)

          by mi ( 197448 ) <slashdot-2017q4@virtual-estates.net> on Thursday October 24, 2013 @09:05AM (#45222909) Homepage Journal

          Although could you tell me the Russian equivalents of the English "Online" and "Site"?

          There really aren't (single-word) equivalents, which is why the English words are now so widely used for the purpose even by the purists and the anti-Americans (of whom there are very many among Russians nowadays)...

          The best I can come up with would be "na linii" ("on line") and "mesto" ("place"), but neither are quite exact a match for the English terms...

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by hazah ( 807503 )
            The English equivalents make as much sense as the russian ones though. Site before the Internet was just what the Russian equivalent is. We simply got used to it, so it's not an issue.

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by TheLink ( 130905 )

              Yep think more about keyboard, monitor, drive, speakers, etc and they start seeming a bit weird ;).

        • Sure, but my point is that they had a chance to add two top-level domains in cyrillic and they chose to transliterate two english words.

  • These new domains seem to split the internet, unless the pages can be read by the English speaking world. Maybe that's the idea, but it seems to move away from the intent of a universal internet.

    • This splits nothing. You can go to a funky alphabeted url just as easily as a latin alphabeted url... Just need the link or to use an appropriate keyboard/on screen keyboard. The internet is pretty split along language lines anyway, if you hadn't noticed. (I do notice, cause I speak 3 languages, and am currently in a country that speaks another.)

    • These new domains seem to split the internet, unless the pages can be read by the English speaking world. Maybe that's the idea, but it seems to move away from the intent of a universal internet.

      Right now there are many millions of websites I can't read because I don't speak Chinese, Korean, Russian, etc. etc. etc.... There can be no "universal Internet" unless everyone speaks the same language, which is never going to happen.

      • Speaking the same language isn't strictly necessary if automatic translation technology catches up. Of course, there will always be words and phrases that don't translate, but those will become avoided in order to better facilitate a "universal" Internet. The fact that I can *access* those pages is more important to facilitating a universal Internet than being able to *read* them.

        • Automatically turning language breakdown get lucky. It does not ever want to be.

          • SciFi universes lacking some kind of universal translator usually have a common language. A middle ground that I haven't really seen mentioned anywhere is each language being spoken in a dialect that is more easily machine-translatable. In other words, the structure of natural languages would shift to be more easily understood by machine translators. You see this already with speech to text programs like Siri and Android have (or even with SEO) - people learn to talk in a way that the machine can more easil

      • Re:Google Translator compatible? (Score:5, Funny)

        by Chrisq ( 894406 ) on Thursday October 24, 2013 @08:18AM (#45222391)

        These new domains seem to split the internet, unless the pages can be read by the English speaking world. Maybe that's the idea, but it seems to move away from the intent of a universal internet.

        Right now there are many millions of websites I can't read because I don't speak Chinese, Korean, Russian, etc. etc. etc.... There can be no "universal Internet" unless everyone speaks the same language, which is never going to happen.

        Not to mention there are many in English that I don't understand; on genetic sequencing, quantum effects, plasma physics, etc.

    • Troll levels: off the charts.

      The "English speaking world" is not the internet. Nor is it anywhere close to being the actual world.

      • In fact, it's a minority.

        Roughly, 20-30% of the world speak English.

        • Far less if you only include native English speakers: US + Canada + Australia + UK = 317+26+23+63 = 429 million. Add some smaller countries like SA and NZ and reach maybe 500 mln, that's barely 7% of the world's population.

          I expected more if you include speakers of English as a second language (like myself).

    • It's worse than letting gays into the Catholic church. They've polluted the purity of the Internet more than divorce has polluted the sanctity of Marriage.

    • How often do you visit Chinese-language or Arabic-language web sites? They all have URLs that are using standard ASCII characters, what's stopping you.

  • The word in cyrlillic ("") is "site", not "sale".

  • is "network" in Arabic. Not web.

  • Not "sale" in Cyrillic, but "site"

  • The World Wide Web has officially just jumped the shark.

    I submit that Eternal September has now ended as all the Newbies will proceed to drown in an ever-rising sea of spam and phishing. I suspect gTLD expansion will do to the Web community what global warming may do to low lying coastal areas.

    • The Web jumped the shark back in the 1990s, shortly after Microsoft started bundling a browser with Windows.

      • I see the rise of FaceBook and mobile, roughly around 2007 as a real shark-jumping. This transformed the web into a much more consumer oriented, dumbed down experience. The intelligent stuff is still out there, but new users aren't drawn into it. Even if they would be inclined to Slashdot, they're corrupted and distracted by all the finger-painting pinch-zoom twerking.

        People were still building their own web pages in the 90s, still experimenting. It was the fertile ground from which many green herbs we

        • I wasn't bashing MS; I was bashing people who can't be bothered/figure out how to install software for themselves.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fatphil ( 181876 )
      Says the guy who bought himself a ".me" domain under the ".uk" CCTLD.

      The jumping started way back, it's now just actually landed with a splash.

      • Looks like my typing skills have also jumped the shark.
        I actually like the set-up that the UK gTLD has... .me.uk - general use (usually personal) .net.uk - ISPs and network companies (unlike .net, use is restricted to these users) .org.uk - general use (usually for non-profit organisations) .co.uk - general use (usually commercial) .ltd.uk - limited companies .plc.uk - public limited companies .gov.uk - government (central and local) .police.uk - police forces[8] .judiciary.uk - courts (to be introduced in

        • .UK has done well to expand its namespace. However, it seems likely that $secondlevel.uk domains will be sold in the future, mostly invalidating the existing 3rd level domains.

          One could argue Vietnam has gone overboard with their namespace expansion: .ac.vn .arts.vn .banks.vn .biz.vn .business.vn .cafe.vn .cars.vn .com.vn .edu.vn .email.vn .factory.vn .fashion.vn .flowers.vn .food.vn .golf.vn .gov.vn .health.vn .hotels.vn .info.vn .int.vn .it.vn .lawyers.vn .models.vn .musics.vn .name.vn .net.vn .nguyen.vn

  • When I translated "" (which is specified as sale in Cyrillic ) using Google translate, Google automatically detected "Russian" language. And, the translation output is "website" not "sale".
  • How can you insert Cyrillic letters or IPA symbols on /.?
  • ...and Slashdot can't show them to us.
  • These would be the first new gTLDs added ... since .aero, .asia, .biz, .cat, .coop, .info, .jobs, .mobi, .museum, .name, .post, .pro, .tel, .travel, and .xxx.

    So not really "first".

    Is the title supposed to read "first non-Latin"?

    • Is the title supposed to read "first non-Latin"?

      Actually not. There is a Russian Federation top level domain that does only accept Cyrillic and therefore I can't type on /.

    • Not even the first non-Latin, as it is already for quite some time possible to register .hk (Hong Kong) using Chinese characters for the TLD. This allows one to have a fully Chinese domain name, as for longer time it was already possible to use Chinese characters for domain name, but with .hk as extension.

    • And it is remarkable to note that there are websites that demand an email address for certain things (login name, contact, etc) that are written to help the user avoid entering incorrect data by enforcing a FOUR CHARACTER MAXIMUM on the TLD. If you have an email under the .museum domain, you're screwed. And then all the XN- domains which, as I recall counting at the time, got up to 26 characters long.

      These are also the sites that enforce character limits on the local part of any email address, disallowing

  • I wonder how a browser will display something like .shabakah - will most software have right-to-eft rendering and the ligature support for Arabic? Also imagine an Arabic TLD that allows Latin domain names - how the hell do you render that..? Anyway, I'm gonna go kill some time on the shabakaat

    • Anyway, I'm gonna go kill some time on the shabakaat

      Ick. Shabacow tastes much better than shabakaat. Shabasheep, yum. And shababacon? Yabba dabba shaba!

    • Check out the marketing site: http://dotshabaka.com/ [dotshabaka.com]

      Copy/paste that text into your favorite text editor to see how it handles right-to-left scripts (and move your cursor around and use 'home' and 'end' keys).

  • Unicode has several combining characters (such as a combining acute accent). There are also lots of single characters which already include an accent (U0225 is an 'a' with acute accent). Will the DNS standard dictate that all be normalized (either all decomposed or all composed; and put in a canonical order), or will U0225 be treated differently than 'a' followed by a combining acute accent?

    • Yes, they will be standardized. All of the registries participating list the Unicode code points for all allowable characters in each script. They disallow "variants" so you cannot mix low code point ascii with high code point cyrllic to prevent IDN homograph attacks [wikipedia.org].

  • Look-alikes (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rabtech ( 223758 ) on Thursday October 24, 2013 @12:47PM (#45226121) Homepage

    Does anyone know if they handle the look-alike issue or are we still stuck with URLs that appear to be latin "paypal.com", but with the "y" replaced by a greek lower gamma (Î) #x3b3, "p" replaced with cyrillic Er (Ñ) #x440, or some other equivalent that appears identical?

    I understand why it's a hard issue: the cyrillic lowercase Er looks *identical* to latin p so they can be mapped to the same character, but the greek lower gamma isn't the exact same glyph as latin lower y, they just look close enough that a user might not notice. Would it be a slight to greek users to force greek domain names to use a misshapen lower gamma? Then what do you do with greek alpha, where the capital matches the latin glyph exactly but the lower does not?

    Then there's the issue that every computer everywhere can enter latin characters, but not everyone has software for or how to use stuff like Chinese characters or Japanese Hirigana. Keeping to basic latin characters makes entering domain names universal, though I understand why that's convenient for an English speaker like me to say. I'd be curious to hear from some people who have non-European first languages how much having to use latin domain names seems to bother the average computer user and whether there is any actual cry for international domain names in their country? How difficult/easy is it to enter latin characters on your keyboard layout? Does it present a barrier to entry for the less educated/literate, or does everyone remember their English classes from school?

  • How does adding 4 domains take the total from 22 to 1400? Shouldn't it be 26?

    • How does adding 4 domains take the total from 22 to 1400? Shouldn't it be 26?

      I believe they will be adding more over a peroid of time.

  • Oops I'm sorry email from user@mydomain.enrichicann is not valid.

    Hey that new TLD does not work in DNS cuz we are not blindly delegating * to root zones.

    Don't allow icann to continue to be enriched at the cost of fucking over the Internet. ICANN does not own you or the network and systems you control.

  • Doesn't this really amount to extortion? (Score:3)

    by jbarr ( 2233 ) on Thursday October 24, 2013 @04:07PM (#45228639) Homepage

    Doesn't the addition of all these domains mean that companies that keep a tight leash on their trademarking (like Coke, Pepsi, Microsoft, etc.) will have to shell out hundreds of new and ongoing registration fees just to ensure that some obscure domain isn't hijacked with their name? This seems more like a cash cow for ICANN than a thought-out expansion.

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