ICANN Approve International Domain Suffixes
November 8th, 2009 by Andreas from Xavier Media®ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has announced that they will start approving TLDs (Top Level Domains) using non-latin characters. This means that government can apply for country codes using characters like ÅÄÖ.
This is not something new, we've seen it before in Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) for .com, .net and several country code domains where you can register domains like www.åäö.com. In theory you should soon be able to register domains like www.åäö.åäö 
According to Sitepoint there are three rules to follow when you apply for a new TLD:
- Countries may only apply for one domain name suffix.
- The suffix must represent the name of the country or an abbreviation.
- Non-Latin versions of .com and .org will not be permitted yet, but ICANN is considering the implications further.
This may at first sound like a new col and useful feature, but imagine someone from China trying to access the web site of a Swedish company at one of these new TLDs. How easy is it for a Chinese person to type www.åäö.åäö? I can for sure say that I'm not going to be able to visit a web site with just Chinese characters 
. This little announcement may cause damage and confusion to the Internet community because of all variations that may occur.
There's also a greater risk of phishing web sites. It's already today hard to see if there's a ´ over one of the characters in a domain name you may see in an email you get. Already today there's a risk that if you get an email from what you may think is your bank or even Paypal you may end up at a scam web sites because the domain name was typed as www.páypal.com. Now we may see even more of this in the future….
One good think is that so far it looks like only governments can apply which may reduce the number of new TLDs.
What do you think about this?
You can read the full announcement from ICANN here.
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