Chinese Character Domain Names on Their Way

Ever thought what it would be like if getting to our favorite web sites involved using a completely foreign system of writing? For many people around the world who do not use the Roman alphabet, it’s a reality. As a result, there has been a push, beginning in 1996, to globalize the internet and allow the use of non-Roman characters in web addresses. And it looks like those efforts are slowly coming to fruition. ICANN formally announced their approval of the .中国 domain with the hope of bringing more Chinese citizens into the World Wide Web earlier this week, although the People's Daily said the organization approved the IDN in an article published back in April.

When we initially heard the news, we were wondering whether site addresses would be completely in characters or just use the .中国suffix. However, ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom stated in a news conference after the announcement that once the domain is set in place users “will be able to type entire domain names including the last characters to the right of the last period entirely in Chinese – so entirely Chinese names.” Companies will no longer have to use pinyin form or some obscure name that might be confusing for non-native English speakers.

Hong Kong and Taiwan will also receive .香港 and .台湾 domains respectively. The new domains in the three countries will utilize both simplified and traditional characters. Beckstrom claims web addresses using the characters should start appearing up within 2-3 months.

The People's Daily article also reported that the World Expo started using 上海世博会.中国 in addition to its expo2010.cn address, however our attempts to access the site using Google Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer gave us no results.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates have also received similar approval to use their own script in domain names, and more alphabets and character sets are on the way.