I was watching the news last night, and they began talking about the decision of the ICANN to implement non-Latin characters on domain names. What that means? In short, for us Asian entertainment fans, it means loads of Asian groups and musicians will be dishing more money to buy those domains for themselves.
Since I’m listening to Lee Hyori’s albums at the moment, I’ll take her as example. Let’s pretend that M-Net Entertainment had bought LeeHyori.com and Lee-Hyori.com, net, co.kr, etc — which they didn’t, IDIOTS — well, now they will have to dish more cash to buy 이효리.com, 이효리.net, 이효리.co.kr, etc.
Everyone is making a big fuzz on the news, and CNN is being particularly stupid about it wondering what Latin-alphabet-users like us will do to enter those address. The ICANN representative finally told it like it is, why would a person who CAN’T read Japanese, who CAN’T read Korean, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, etc would enter a website with a non-Latin URL?
I, on the other hand, think that this decision is just to cash in some more bucks, this time on the other side of the world. After all, these other companies who already own their Latin URL will also have to buy their non-Latin version. I mean, it would be a revolution if this Non-Latin implementation would let me type 可口可乐.com and would automatically open the website of Coca Cola China, without the need to buy that domain in addition to pay for coca-cola.com.cn, right?
Big money suckers!
When you live in a country where Latin characters might as well be a alien language then this is a big deal
True, but why should you pay for it? It should be automatic. My issue isn’t the characters, I support the idea, but If you already own Coca Cola.com, you should be able to type Coca Cola in Chinese and it should be automatic. Why having to buy it?
Otherwise companies that buy domains that they might think are worth buying would begin buying all domains with the names of all Asian entertainment artists, starting with Jay Chou’s name, Bi’s, DBSK, Shiina Ringo… anything goes. Nothing much to lose, just a lot of big news URL names.