[vaksel]

oh please, like we are supposed to believe ICANN cares about internalization. The only reason they want to do this, is to make more money off the fees from the idiots who'll buy these crappy domains.

We've seen hundreds of TLDs launched that were touted as game changers. .info, .biz, .us, and those are the big ones, and noone wants them. .COM is king, it is ingrained in internet users worldwide.

Yes local countries have their .rus and .chs but that's the whole point. The QWERTY keyboard is the standard worldwide.

Trying to bypass that, just reeks of opportunism

[ramchip]

You'd be surprised. I'd say the vast majority of URLs I see around in Japan end in .jp. Hitting ctrl+enter after an URL will add www and .co.jp on most computers, not .com. Few people understand english sufficiently to browse the english-speaking internet; the best example is probably Facebook, which is rarely used here, while its local equivalent mixi.jp is extremely popular.

Also, the QWERTY keyboard is just not the standard worldwide...

That being said, I don't think people will start using japanese URLs much. The alphabet + .jp is already ingrained and more convenient. Also, most phones will refuse japanese characters in an email adress and perhaps in an URL, which is a game breaker here.

[blasdel]

Facebook has extraordinarily good localizations, done primarily by their active users: http://www.facebook.com/translations/

Japaneses tastes are quite different when it comes to design, anonymity, and personal privacy -- and the divergent social network doesn't help anything.

[skinnymuch]

Hey, hey! Don't be putting down .info. It brought about millions of spam sites!

[yangyang]

> The QWERTY keyboard is the standard worldwide.

Try telling that to a frenchman.