Why Chinese/Japanese/Korean domain names are a bad idea

Greggman has a good point about the new Asian language domain names that are now available:

If the whole point of the internet is that it connects people then Chinese/Japanese/Korean domain names are a bad idea. Why? Because anybody that can't enter Chinese, Japanese or Korean cannot access any domain using one of those languages.

What happens when they open up 暑い郵便.com ?

For you people that can't read that it's says HOTMAIL in Japanese. Then lots of people sign up for it. They decide they want to talk to somebody outside their country, maybe to get a more open mind about the rest of the world. But wait, nobody outside their country can type that address. Not even Chinese and Koreans can enter Japanese or visa versa. In other words, Korean, Japan and China will effectively shut themselves out from the rest of the world. Nobody outside those countries will be able to access their websites or their e-mail.

Sounds like bad news to me.

Built-in foreign languages in W2k, WME...

I agree - very stupid idea.

Even though when you install Windows 2000 or Windows ME, it asks you what input locales you would like to install. For example, I can enter Japanese, Traditional Chinese, and German characters...

Of course not everyone knows about this... and even if they've installed it, who is to say that they know *how* to enter them... there are ELEVEN ways to enter Traditional Chinese, and NONE works for me without proper training.

I will give it a year tops, then it will just die out in its own natural internet way, just like the freshly-bankrupt

http://www.chinesebooks.com/
(read: chinese AMAZON wannabe)

whose CONTACT CUSTOMER SERVICE button is *disabled*. Haha.

True... but

The ability, or rather inability of many Japanese to compute outside of the Japanese language seems to be the driving force behind the introduction of Japanese domains (the same is probably true for Korea/Chinese as well). Looking at all the Japanese gear, everything is in Japanese, from keyboards to mobile phones, you have Japanese, and usually Japanese ONLY.

So while I agree with most of you, the only way that a mom & pop store can go online and utilize the web may be for them to use Japanese domain names. The Japanese have perfected the input of Japanese characters for the past 30 years so I figure that they sort of know what their doing. (The same may be said, though not to such a lengthy extent, of Korean and Chinese.)

It's a pain for outsiders to view Japanese, and perhaps vice versa. But, there is a huge domestic market, where branding for such things as magazines, restaurants, mom & pop stores, and local SMEs only have their names in Japanese. How do you create a dotcom domain for the local chain of Japanese Teas? TokyoHibiyaOchanomono.co.jp?

This is a short term solution to help with the long term goal of full Internet proliferation. I suggest danchan get to work on a highly adaptive/self-learning translation program that will automatically convert all text in all languages into any other language (one that actually works).

P.S. Chinese Books Cyberstore went into official voluntary liquidation in early August after its shareholders pulled funding. However, there are still on-going negotiations about a possible bailout which is why the website is actually still running.