New Domain Name Extensions: Let’s Make Up Some News
Ever since ICANN announced that non-Roman letter domain name extensions would be made available (i.e. top-level domains, or TLDs), I’ve seen lots of stories out there about how this will dramatically change the Internet, and how web surfing for all the poor, non-English speakers out there in the third world will finally be able to type in URLs in their own language.
Yes, it’s nice that a .中国 will be available, along with other non-Roman letter language extensions. However, the weird assumptions made by the press about the web surfing habits of folks outside the U.S. are really laughable.
To wit: I was listening to a podcast of a US news show yesterday that ended with a short bit on the new extensions. The theme was how great it was that the English-centric Internet was to be opened up to other languages.
The segment started with a reference to a “typical Chinese computer keyboard.” Now, remember that I was listening to an audio podcast, so I’m not sure what the visual was for this. However, based on the audio, it sounded like someone found a keyboard whose keys had dual Chinese character/Latin symbols.
Right. First off, whatever they were looking at was not a keyboard with Chinese characters on it. Most likely it was a wu bi (or similar) keyboard that had radicals on the keys, not entire characters.
Second, I haven’t seen one of those keyboards in a long time. Not too many people use wu bi or other radical-based input methods anymore, and if they do, they usually don’t use special keyboards.
Most folks I know type Chinese through menu-driven Windows software, through web-based input methods, or various other software that use pinyin (I must admit that until recently my wife used wu bi). Maybe some people still have those keyboards out there, but the numbers can’t be very high.
Anyway, the story then suggested that the poor Chinese web surfers who don’t know English (they used an example of a farmer in a small village – I shit you not) really had no way of typing in those confusing foreign URLs. You know, like XINHUA or BAIDU or YOUKU.
Not once in the story was the term pinyin used.
If this has proven at all confusing, I would direct your attention to a much better informed article in the Wall Street Journal blog on the topic. I particularly enjoyed this quote, which sums up the story for me nicely:
Video Web site Tudou.com: “No, we don’t have immediate plans [to buy a Chinese domain]. Most Chinese users are used to spelling domain names, and Tudou is an easy one to remember” because of its catchy name and because it was one of the earlier video Web sites. Getting a Chinese character name has not been “a high nor serious priority for us.”
In other words, this is an interesting development with respect to the web, but in the end, not a whole lot is going to change.
As someone who fights his schedule on a daily basis just to find some extra time to blog, I really dislike lazy journalism. People who are paid (on a full-time basis) to write news articles should at least get their shit together before it goes to print/out on the airwaves. Good job WSJ, bad job [unmentioned cable tv news show].
This is a mildly interesting story for people interested in domain names (I follow this stuff because I practice trademark law), but setting it up as developing-countries-versus-the-hegemonic-U.S./English-Internet is a stretch.
