Slouching Toward Multilingual .com

According to Associated Press, ICANN is inching closer to offering complete native-language domain names.

Now what does this mean?

There are two ways to offer an “internationalized” domain name.

The easy way, which is now available commercially, is to offer a non-Latin domain but continue to the use the traditional top level domain, such as .com or .org.

So what you end up with a mixture of Latin and non-Latin characters.

The better and much more complex internationalized domain is one that supports the native script across the full domain, including the top-level domain.

John Yunker
John Yunker

John is co-founder of Byte Level Research and author of Think Outside the Country as well as 19 editions of The Web Globalization Report Card.

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