[LINK] Dot Asia a good idea?

[Kim Davies]

Quoting Tom Worthington on Tuesday October 09, 2007:
| 
| There is also still some debate on how to handle 16 bit character 
| sets for Asian languages, such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The 
| easy way is to convert them to the existing ASCII subset used for 
| domain names. But this is not as convenient as a native implementation.

There is no debate about how to handle character sets for Asian
languages. The technical standards to accomodate these have existed for
years. Firstly there is Unicode which allows expression of many of the
worlds languages including CJK, and there is IDNA which allows encoding
of Unicode in the DNS. Right now you can register a variety of domain
names in Chinese, Japanese and Korean; I imagine you could place an
Asian language label within the tomw.net.au domain if you so desired.
There is no reason to expect you wouldn't be able to do so within .asia.

There are some policy issues under consideration on a global level,
such as extending the ISO 3166-1 style taxonomy for country-code
top-level domains into multiple character sets; or whether the concept
of subsidiarity can be extended to multiple domains. The current ccTLD
delegation model works relatively well but is based on a number of
concepts that break down when extended beyond the current framework into
non-Latin labels. However, this has nothing to do with the maturity of
the technology and the ability to use Asian languages.

kim