Anything Goes

ICANN just announced they will ease the restrictions on top level domain names. This means in the near future you might see DNS names like Granger.Church or M3.BMW. Although this might be a good thing in the long run, I believe this will mean much more confusion for the less than savvy Internet user.

ICANN is also tossing one more wrench into the works, it is going to allow non-Roman characters as part of the DNS address. Soon there will Arabic, Croatian, Chinese, you name it, characters as part of the naming convention. This will mean much more overhead for DNS servers which will not only have to run unicode but will need to have all character sets loaded.

I’m a bit concerned about the new character sets for several reasons, first I’m afraid they will offer more attack surface for the nefarious. Secondly, I’m afraid of the beast the web browsers will become because of the added overhead. And finally I fear these character sets will make it even harder for content filtering to stop unwanted content from reaching our children.

I guess all we can do is wait and see…