The .asia regional internet domain has officially opened for business. This should be interesting.. Especially intriguing and massively significant (and curiously mentioned only as a minor side-note in the article) is the separate initiative being tested by ICANN to allow for domain names in non-latin scripts/character sets, ie, domain names written directly in Arabic, Chinese, Thai, Khmer, etc. script rather than some phonetically romanized version of those. This change will make the internet infinitely more accessible to the masses who don’t speak/read/write English.
It will be very interesting to see what effects this addition of native language support, once complete, will have on the following and other areas:
- IT and networking infrastructure — For example, the practical problem of an American or German network administrator troubleshooting a connectivity or DNS problem to a Taiwanese website with a URL like http://愉快的馬農場.中華民國 or a Korean website with a URL like http://행복한 말 농장.한국).
- Business — This will potentially & likely lead to massive internet connectivity adoption rates among previously unreached people groups — lower-class and/or less educated people who only know a local language, but already have the connectivity infrastructure available to them. This could well turn out to be the shot-in-the-arm that the IT and Networking industries have been needing to help them revive from the slowing economy and the dot-com bust, which, although a relatively long time ago, left the industries badly shaken.
- Politics — Control of the internet in many ways is currently still effectively in the hands of the US government, as it is after all basically a US DoD (DARPA; at the time known as ARPA) invention; the ARPANET was the direct predecessor to the internet. This change will vastly complicate that level of control.
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