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View Full Version : New post on Chinese gTLDs .点看 .大拿


mgrohan
16th June 2012, 05:15 AM
OK a post to clear up lot of misunderstanding i’ve been regarding on Verisign’s choices for Chinese .com (.点看) and .net (.大拿).

1) As with all the other strings Versign has applied for in IDN, they all are transliterations of .com or .net. They have not applied for .company or .network in any other languages, so why are people expecting them to do it in Chinese, i don’t know.

2) .com originally meant .commercial anyway.. So, as to why people are asking for .company instead of commercial, also confuses me.
.com has since totally outgrown its original meaning anyway, and it is now recognizable on its own without having the commercial connotations. The reason why Verisign are applying for translits.


.公司
Just to clear up about .公司, it is not used or recognized as ‘dot com’ in China either. If chosen, it would have actually been more detrimental compared to the current choice which has not much meaning and which is not susceptible to wrongly classifying a domain.

From a thread on IDNForums, a city domain name was brought up. If .公司 had been chosen, (in the example) 山东.公司, would have meant Shandong companies. It would have really pigeon holed and restricted what the website was about, same goes for other websites, if .公司 was used it would basically state the domain topic as an actual business, effectively killing the .com extension for general use as it is today.

eg
旅行.公司 Travel.company travel.company rather than travel.com
苹果.公司 Apple.company (could not make a website about apples)
汽车.公司 Car.company etc etc

These above names, all sound like companies. If they were listed in google/baidu it would look like a business directory.

You would not be able to have a general purpose / informational website.
And i guess most generics names with companies sharing the names would be in danger of taken away.


.点看 & .大拿
There are no 100% transliterations in Chinese, they do their best to pronounce the words with the characters they have. Even in different parts of China, where there are different dialects, different transliterations can be used.
As Versign were forced to have 2 characters, they had no choice but to apply for . dot com and . dot net.

These are not terrible choices, as they tried to come up with a clever dual meaning while staying close to the pronunciation of .com and .net

Some of my comments on the choices:
1) They are not established translits, and therefore need to be explained to the public, what they are, and then gain popularity in usage (a bit ask IMO)

2) Secondary meanings are a bit (too much) of a stretch. IMO — it will just not make sense to most people. It will require some one to explain to them what it means, and will not help them to catch on quickly.

3) I don’t think the current IDN.com owners would have any pull to change to .点看. If it was free maybe.. But even then, probably not, just look at the ‘conversion’ of .cn to full IDN. (And that is with government support/use and media coverage)

4) I find it a bit strange that the translit. for (dot) is not the same. one is pronounced ‘dian’ the other ‘da’. I thought they should have kept them uniform/together. for example Korean (the only other language versign were forced to used 2 characters, where (proper language) would have made sense to use one. .닷넷 (.com) and .닷컴 (.net), the dot is 닷 in both)

You can read the rest on the blog post: http://www.idnfocus.com/2012/06/chinese-new-gtlds-for-com-and-net-%E7%82%B9%E7%9C%8B-%E5%A4%A7%E6%8B%BF/