first thing I thought when I heard of that a couple of days ago is this is gonna be a new source of concern for web security…this will start at the beginning of next year.
Security experts have cautioned that expanding the net’s domain name system will lead to more cyber-crime and fraud, but ICANN decided that the threat was minimal, compared to the benefits of attracting more users to the net.
Governance issues
In the Memorandum of Understanding that set up the relationship between ICANN and the U.S. government, ICANN was given a mandate requiring that it operate "in a bottom up, consensus driven, democratic manner." However, the attempts that ICANN have made to set up an organizational structure that would allow wide input from the global Internet community did not produce results amenable to the current Board. As a result, the At-Large constituency and direct election of board members by the global Internet community were soon abandoned.
It is argued that ICANN was never given the authority to decide policy (i.e., choose new TLDs or shut out other interested parties who refuse to pay ICANN's US$185,000 fee), but was to be a technical caretaker. Critics suggest that ICANN should not be allowed to impose business rules on market participants, and that all TLDs should be added on a first-come-first-served basis and the market should be the arbiter of who succeeds and who does not.[citation needed]
A member of the European Parliament, William Newton-Dunn, has recently been addressing questions to the European Commission which asks whether ICANN is engaging in restraint of European free trade laws by imposing restrictions on who can operate a TLD and sell domain names.[21] Some restrictions are considered insurmountable by many small business owners and individuals, such as the perhaps-partially-refundable $185,000 application fee.
I don’t think it’s a good idea either. I mean, imagine how would an address entirely made out of chinese letters look to users from EU or US. I mean, how the hell am i suppose to type in such addresss into the URL bar with a latin keyboard on my computers? Or how to understand what it says? English is universal and everyone understand it world wide. How many of you actually understand asian or any of the islamic languages? Dictionary and translation features for URL bars!? C’mon. Makes no sense to me at all…
If it is purely the matter of languages, it shouldn’t be a problem since, if we need translation for URL at all, we probably need it for the content, too. It would be more problematic for Asians/Arabic people who travel in USA/Europe since they wouldn’t have easy access to input devices/applications which allow them to type these languages to access sites with these URLs. I guess new problems will come up when these URLs actually begin to be used.
