The comment period for the draft rules prepared by ICANN for the next round of the new generic top-level domains program has recently ended. According to Domain Incite, the rule clause that provides for the possibility of delegating single-character domains in Han encoding, used in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, has received the most negative comments. The logic of those who propose allowing such domains is quite obvious: in these languages, a single hieroglyph can mean a whole word or even a concept denoted by several words.
However, this is the problem, according to the speakers of these languages themselves. In their comments, they pointed out that hieroglyphs often have multiple meanings. For example, Rui Zhong from the China Internet Society notes that the character 新 can mean “new” in Chinese, but at the same time it is an abbreviation for the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, as well as the name of the people of Singapore. And Lang Wang from the CNNIC, which manages the national domain of the PRC .CN, directly warns that the delegation of single-character generic top-level domains will create serious risks not only of errors, but also of deliberate abuse, phishing attacks, etc.
