中国 top-level domain by 2009

[gougou]

"ICANN expects ".中国" domain name will be officially put into use in 2009."

http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90776/90882/6516241.html

How is that going to work if I want to write an email to a Chinese friend from a computer that doesn't have an IME installed? Especially when the part before the @ can be in Chinese, too, homonyms will make pinyin transcription impossible.

The internet used to be very convenient to bring together people from completely different corners of the globe that otherwise would never have know about each other, but that seems to be a step in the opposite direction.

[Xiao Kui]

It seems optional, and it seems to me that people who are interested in doing business and communicating internationally will stick to English and pinyin. I hope it goes the way of the New Coca-Cola

[trevelyan]

I suppose it will map to hex-encoded UTF8. Just more inconvenient to type if your machine doesn't support non-English fonts.

[imron]

I imagine, it will almost certainly use punycode, which is what is currently used in international domain names. Therefore, the actual address of email@example.中国 would be email@.example.xn--fiqs8s

Which is going to screw up all sorts of websites using rather limited regular expressions to test for valid emails.

[imron]

Couldn't help but laugh at this though:

which means English-dominant era which began in 1982 is about to end.

Haha, not likely. Internationalized domain names have been around for a few years now, and they haven't really taken off. I don't expect it to be too much different when internationalized top-level domains come in either. Basically it's just another way for ICANN to make money because now Chinese companies will need to register the .com and the .中国 domains

[roddy]

Yep, try, eg: 中国银行.com - it redirects to http://xn--fiqs8s856bruk.com/, which is a generic domain-squatters page, but it works. If ICANN had their way, we'd probably have .中國， and perhaps even grass script too. It'll go the same way as .biz, .info and .mobi - you might buy it, but only because you already have, or can't get, the .com.

As for emails - I can see it being useful domestically, but anyone doing anything international (which to be fair probably isn't a massive percentage) will likely need two addresses.

[imron]

中国银行.com - it redirects to http://xn--fiqs8s856bruk.com/

Slight pedantic, semantic quibble, it doesn't redirect to, but rather it is that domain - just using the punycode encoding - an encoding that allows you to represent all unicode code points into the limited character set permitted in hostnames.

The xn--blahblahblah is what gets registered by the registrar and stored in DNS servers and caches everywhere. When a user types in e.g. 中国银行.com the browser (i.e. the client-side) converts this to punycode and then does a DNS lookup on that. Technically, no redirection occurs.