Stéphane Van Gelder, Chairman of Milathan, former creator of the INDOM registrar, and one of the most recognized experts in domain marketing and consulting, outlines major issues facing new TLDs in his recent article. Basically, there is one major problem -- the universal acceptance of top level domains. Van Gelder describes four aspects of this key topic.
First of all, not all browsers and email clients have the technical capabilities to support new domains. For example, if you type www.example.guru into the address bar, some browsers will report an error even though the .guru domain boasts the most registrations among new domains.
Secondly, developers have to adjust to new changes within a very short time. Van Gelder stressed that in 2004, only a limited number of TLDs (.BIZ, .INFO, etc.) were added to the root zone; therefore, developers had enough time to “teach” their products to recognize them. Currently, over 250 strings have been delegated, which makes the task much more complicated.
The third and probably most crucial issue concerns non-Latin script TLDs. Van Gelder refers to the Chinese statistics, according to which about 50% of the browsers used in China do not support Chinese Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs). Many devices require additional plug-ins to support Chinese characters. The same problem exists in other countries with non-Latin scripts. Eventually, Van Gelder believes, users will just decide against using IDNs, which ICANN sees as a key part of the new gTLD program and which are supposed to change the online landscape by making it truly international.
And finally, mobile devices. Browsers and email clients for them are significantly limited, which makes universal acceptance more complicated. However, mobile devices are mostly used by young people, the target of the new gTLD program. Ignoring their interests would mean throwing the whole idea to the wolves.
Stéphane Van Gelder concludes that the universal acceptance issue must be resolved more quickly. Specifically, he notes that the technology for correctly rendering IDN web addresses was developed even before the new gTLD program and has been successfully used by many national domains. Van Gelder gives .РФ as an example. He believes that ICANN and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) must focus on coordinating efforts in this respect. The expert claims that these organizations are quite capable of dealing with many problems at once but not as efficient when it comes to solving just one.
