ICANN Allows Top Level Domains in Any Language or Script

ICANN (International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has announced that it will allow generic Top Level Domains to be in any language or script. It also means radically increasing the number of name endings for URLs which now stand at 22 and includes .com, .org and others.

ICANN_LogoICANN (International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has announced that it will allow generic Top Level Domains to be in any language or script. It also means radically increasing the number of name endings for URLs which now stand at 22 and includes .com, .org and others.

So now the name ending of a domain name, can be just about anything. For example Facebook.com could potentially register Face.book where “.book” will be the Top Level Domain name.

Here is a quote from ICANN’s announcement.

ICANN has opened the Internet’s naming system to unleash the global human imagination. Today’s decision respects the rights of groups to create new Top Level Domains in any language or script. We hope this allows the domain name system to better serve all of mankind

Creating a level playing field

Because of tradition, “.com” and other top level domain names will still be very valuable but this does create a level playing field for people who use the internet and do not use Latin-based script.

It also will reduce the idea of blocking domain names for re-selling them to brands or rising websites who might want it later. It also might make it a lot easier to remember URLs which are spelled naturally and people do not have to deal with the complexities of thinking if the domain name ended with a “.com” or a “.org”

What are your views on this new change to domain names? Do drop in your comments.

3 Comments

Siddhartha Sinha June 20, 2011

I hope this thing was already there.

Balakrishnan B June 23, 2011

I don’t understand what you mean by any language. Any language supported by unicode? urls will be in unicode instead of ascii?

Aditya Kane June 24, 2011

@Balakrishnan B: Thanks for bringing that subject up, Internationalized Domain Names or IDN were disucssed at ICANN which would allow domain names in not ASCII – Read more here.