The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, has approved the sweeping overhaul we mentioned the other day. Now companies will be able to register their own unique top-level domain (TLD), which is sure to be as annoying as it sounds. But think of the branding opportunities! “Go to littlebigworld.ps3 to see the all new trailer!” ”Download a special coupon from bestbuy.rocks.” And so on.
Slash.dot, anyone?
It’ll work like, if Company A register the .product TLD, all subsequent requests to use that TLD—reallycool.product—will go through Company A.
The ability to use non-Roman characters in URLs was also approved.
Don’t think you’re gonna be clever and register the .sex or .xxx TLD post-haste, though, as registering a unique TLD will run upwards of six figures USD. Expensive!
This all starts next year, and I’m already annoyed at the prospect of it.
Seems like a ploy to make a lot of people a lot of money. Also an opportunity for snobbery.
“Oh, you’ve got your own website? That’s cute. I’ve got my own TLD.”
Allow me to geek out for a moment:
Have you seen the way they’re going to encode the non-ASCII international characters into the ASCII domain names? It’s not UTF8 with % HEX HEX encoding, as you might expect from looking at any international URL. Oh no, that would be too logical. They invented a brand new encoding called Punycode to encode the Unicode characters. I’m not joking, check out RFC 3492. It’s a fairly complex algorithm, and the output looks like gibberish. Example conversion of Chinese (simplified):
u+4ED6 u+4EEC u+4E3A u+4EC0 u+4E48 u+4E0D u+8BF4 u+4E2D u+6587
Punycode: ihqwcrb4cv8a8dqg056pqjye
Intuitive, eh? I guess it doesn’t really matter since your browser will normally do the conversion for you, but still come on! Domain names are supposed to be readable!