A splintered world wide web

ICANN has now approved a huge increase to what can be considered as a TLD, so that not only will .com and .net be joined by thousands of other variations, but that non-latin characters will also be allowed so that domain names will be available in other languages like chinese.

This will come at roughly the same time as IPv6 which hugely increases the number of IP addresses available to networks across the world.

The question is that with people going to be able to create websites using different languages, how is it going to be possible to even consider browsing to sites in different languages.

Are all the browsers going to be updated to handle this excess of characters and is everyone going to have to learn to write different languages in order to see these sites.

Ok, I'll admit its a fairly Anglo-centric view and I would guess that a lot of countries are looking forward to havnig websites and their domain names in their own language, but are we actually adding barriers to cross communication by adding all the languages back in?

Maybe I'm not getting the gist of this, but will it matter to the average websurfer if the domain name isn't in English, if the content of the site isn't in English? I guess not having a Chinese character keyboard, I won't be able to search for Chinese websites if I want to, so that would be a barrier. I also wonder if non-English speakers will still use English domains, for the exact purpose of reaching the widest audience? It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Yes and I think many countries love the idea of more barriers.

This won't remove the Chinese, etc. sights that already exist, will it? It's just adding more levels, as it were?

Nothing makes me feel as dumb as computer/internet matters ...