Five new IDNs have been introduced for China, Taiwan and Hong Kong

Jun 28, 2010 10:59 GMT  ·  By

The internationalization of top level domain names continues with the approval of Chinese-character ccTLDs (country code top level domains) by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). A total of five new domain names have been approved; China and Taiwan get two each and Hong Kong one.

There are two versions per domain name, one in Simplified Chinese and the other with Traditional Chinese characters. For Hong Kong, the characters matched so there is only one version. This enables Chinese websites to have a fully localized version of their domain names.

“This approval is a significant change for Chinese language users worldwide,” Rod Beckstrom, President and CEO of ICANN, said. “One fifth of the world speaks Chinese and that means we just increased the potential online accessibility for roughly a billion people.”

The importance of the Chinese market cannot be underestimated. The country already has the largest number of Internet users in the world and that audience is growing at a solid pace. Chinese is also one of the most used languages online. Yet, so far, all domain names registered in the country ended in .cn or variations like .com.cn, .org.cn or .net.cn. This lead to .com actually being the most popular top level domain name for Chinese webmasters.

ICANN is now making five new IDN (internationalized domain name) ccTLDs available: .中国 and .中國 for China, .台灣 and .台湾 for Taiwan, and .香港 for Hong Kong. The handling of the domain names has been referred to the relevant organizations in each country, CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center), HKIRC (Hong Kong Internet Registration Corporation Limited) and TWNIC (Taiwan Network Information Center).

This is the second step in the adoption of IDNs after a long debate over their introduction. While domain names written in a non-Latin alphabet may be great for the local markets, they may create problems for the web at large. The first three IDNs went live a couple of months ago for the Arabic countries of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.