New Domains Mean More Growth, Risk
It’s official. Now, for the first time, there are web addresses in an alphabet other than Latin-based, and I think it’s time to celebrate what that means: more growth for IT and the cloud.
The Internet regulator, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), pulled a switch to allow a system that allows full web addresses that contain no Latin characters. And the countries of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have become the first to have so-called “country codes” written in Arabic scripts, and more than 20 other countries have requested approval for international domains.
Before hand, sites could use some non-Latin letters, but the country code top-level domains (CCTLDs), for example, .eg for Egypt, required Latin script. So the new codes will allow the full addresses to be written in Arabic.
The BBC reports that this is the first step in allowing other codes for the web – for example, Chinese, Thai and Tamil.
Icann told BBC News that the new country code top-level domains (CCTLDs) represent “the most significant day” since the launch of the web. “It’s about including that large part of our world into the internet today,” Tina Dam, Icann’s senior director for internationalized domain names told the BBC, noting that without the new domains there was risk that the web might have broken up into systems for those who speak only Chinese, Arabic, Thai and other languages.
While access to new internationalized domain names (IDNs) will require people to update the fonts in their PCs, laptops or apps on their smart phones, they nonetheless represent giant opportunities for companies with global operations. That is, IDNs will allow them to better serve customers and fine tune marketing strategies to reach a bigger audience.
IDNs also represent greater risk, and that is, that, as more businesses use the addresses and conduct commerce over the web, they’ll need to make sure their sites are running in top condition. They’ll need to make sure sites are accessible to end users and transactions are fast and efficient. And, if they’re operating from the cloud, they’ll need to know the platform is up and running and other usage metrics. Monitoring services that have a multi-cultural business plan and that can operate from many regions of the world will have the upper hand in meeting their customers’ needs.
