> I'm sympathetic with a huge chunk of the world's population having to deal with a (potentially) unfamiliar character set, but what can you do about it?
Well, seeing as that "huge chunk" is a large majority, then the solution isn't "learn english because I'm used to typing URLs _this_ way."
I understand that English is the current lingua franca, but it's aggressive to expect everyone to deal with it just to use the internet.
Why not use our country tlds? It might mean that ICANN has to actually do some work, but I think that the uppermost tld for countries should actually be reserved for suffixes.
e.g.
apple.us #should have never been sold
apple.com.us #there, none of that scary unicode
apple.com.ru #same unicode problem abound (but at least it addresses the first issue)
Well, seeing as that "huge chunk" is a large majority, then the solution isn't "learn english because I'm used to typing URLs _this_ way."
I understand that English is the current lingua franca, but it's aggressive to expect everyone to deal with it just to use the internet.
Why not use our country tlds? It might mean that ICANN has to actually do some work, but I think that the uppermost tld for countries should actually be reserved for suffixes.
e.g.
apple.us #should have never been sold apple.com.us #there, none of that scary unicode apple.com.ru #same unicode problem abound (but at least it addresses the first issue)