Friday, Oct 12, 2007    Text size: 

The other languages being tested by ICANN, officially known as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, are Korean, Hebrew, Japanese, Tamil, and both simplified and traditional Chinese.

Webmasters who participate in the test won't be able to buy domains ending in dot-com, dot-org or any common endings at first – only dot-test will be permitted.

The possible change will challenge the Roman alphabet's dominance over cyberspace while potentially offering adult webmasters new ways to promote their products.

Adult webmaster Loren Williams told XBIZ that "hardcore domain junkies" would be well advised to work with translators fluent in the languages being tested.

"I'd buy a ton of adult and non-adult terms, [common terms] and slang," he said. "I'd push the type-in traffic to sponsors who can process internationally and hope that ICANN's test works out. One man's gibberish might be worth another man's treasure one day."

But HotMovies Director of Marketing James Cybert told XBIZ that his company tried a similar tactic two years ago when they bought about 50 domains that spelled common Japanese sexual slang terms in phonetic English.

"We gave it a shot, but the traffic was very limited," he said. "In the short term, how many end-users are going to know that they can type in those characters?"

Cybert added, though, that if ICANN's test is successful, it could provide a better way for adult webmasters to surgically promote their content in non-English-speaking countries.

According to Cybert, webmasters might also have a slew of new ways to buy new versions of already existing domains by using non-Roman characters as separators instead of the usual hyphens and underscores.

But it could be a boon to spammers.

"I could definitely see spammers and phishers using the foreign characters to build phony domain names," Cybert said.

As an example, Cybert said a phisher could simply add a non-Roman character to a common domain like Google.com and wind up with a web address that not only looks like Google at a glance, but that also has a dot-com ending.

For more information, visit ICANN.org.