A world of opportunities and pitfalls may lay ahead now that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) - the governing body that oversees Internet addresses - has voted to fast track a plan to permit web addresses in characters other than the Latin alphabet.
The move means that internationalized top-level domain names - the country code portions of URLs, such as .jp for Japan - can now be written using Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Hindi or Korean characters instead of the Roman alphabet.
Governments can begin submitting requests for specific domain names in non-Latin scripts on Nov. 16, with the first expected to go live in early 2010.
Online marketers - especially of global brands - have a lot of prep work ahead for the change. For starters, the ICANN decision means software developers will have to make sure their applications work with non-Latin scripts. Right now, not all e-mail systems do.
500 Top-Level Domains
On a bigger scale, the move also also means that marketers have to rethink
their concept of how information will be posted, presented and searched online.
The change has the potential of expanding the existing 21 Top Level Domains (TLDs) to 500 or even more and these are likely to be organized around themes of common interest or community, E. Thomas Watson, an attorney with Robinson, Bradshaw & Hinson said in a TechNewsWorld article. "It could make them more interesting or viable than existing names."
At the same time 500 new TLDs also means 500 new ways that a brand could be corrupted or hijacked. Brands will have to step up their monitoring, Blake Lawit, an attorney with Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin, also told TechNewsWorld.
"They will need to register not only the domain names that are key to their products in many new languages, but they will also need to police cybersquatters and typo-squatters in many new languages," Lawit said.
.Gay
The market last heard about ICANN earlier this month when two for-profit groups announced they are planning to start the application process to create a top-level website domain, ".gay." If successful, adding another suffix to a growing list that includes ".com," ".edu,” ".org," and ".ne" would be a significant change, and will likely influence how marketers target the LGBT community online.
