Re: [ga] On Its Way: One of the Biggest Changes to the Internet

["Prophet Partners Inc." <Domains@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Next Monday, 15 October 2007, Internet users around the globe will be able 
to access wiki pages with the domain name example.test in 11 test 
languages - Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, 
Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil.
The wikis will allow Internet users to establish their own subpages with 
their own names in their own language. The evaluation is being done in the 
11 languages of the Internet communities that have shown the most interest 
in moving IDNs from concept to reality.
The full introduction of IDNs will mean that people can write the whole of a 
domain name in the characters used to write their own language. Presently 
you can only use these characters before the dot, so .com, .net, .org and 
the like can only be written in characters from basic Latin. IDNs will 
change this so that literally tens of thousands of characters will be 
available to the world."
=======================================

Some thoughts in no particular order:

1) This sounds like the death of TLDs like .asia before they even get 
launched.
2) Complete usability tests will need to cover additional protocols such as 
HTTPS, FTP and SMTP.
3) Safeguards should be created to prevent the creation of look-alike 
variations of TLDs that will be exploited by cyber criminals. IMO, a 
significant number of Internet users not aware of IDN TLDs, would fall prey 
to phishing attempts from a domain using .cöm (umlaut) or .cá (acute accent) 
or .dê (circumflex accent).
Sincerely,
Ted
Prophet Partners Inc.
http://www.ProphetPartners.com
http://www.Premium-Domain-Names.com


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "GNSO.SECRETARIAT@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <gnso.secretariat@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ga@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, October 10, 2007 5:27 AM
Subject: [ga] On Its Way: One of the Biggest Changes to the Internet



[To: council[at]gnso.icann.org; liaison6c[at]gnso.icann.org]
[To: ga[at]gnso.icann.org; announce[at]gnso.icann.org]
[To: regional-liaisons[at]icann.org]

http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-2-09oct07.htm

 MARINA DEL REY, Calif.: The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names
and Numbers will launch an evaluation of Internationalized Domain Names
next week that will allow Internet users to test top-level domains in 11
languages.

Read more!
--
Glen de Saint Géry
GNSO Secretariat - ICANN
gnso.secretariat[at]gnso.icann.org
http://gnso.icann.org