Government-sponsored monopoly strikes again. In what could be falsely interpreted as a small step in the right direction, interweb naming and numbering regulator ICANN have given the go-ahead for complete freedom (of course, with valid reason) over what appears after the final dot in your domain name.

This, I have no beef with. It’s with a residual decision to open addresses up to non-roman character sets such as Asian Kanji and whatever that Arabic squiggle is called.

Look down at your keyboard. Chances are you don’t see any Asian characters. Now imagine you’re a Chinese native living in the west wanting to communicate with your friends and family back home aboard new Chinese social network startup; ‘The Friend Ship’* - well, enjoy clicking your onscreen keyboard over and over whenever you want to access it. Although Apple’s made some ground in combatting this, users of mobile devices are at even more of a loss.

What we need on the net is standards. There’s a reason why we have recommendations set for languages such as XHTML; it’s to allow universal accessibility regardless of user agent, allowing business, consumer and casual user alike to interact freely. Effectively disabling certain users from accessing certain areas of the worldwide web will do nothing to bring the web users of the world together, its an isolationist idea being implemented where such a train of thought has no place. It will, however, serve as a great money sink to fund further tyrany-by-proxy (in an area we know for a fact the “powers” that be want to stick their noses in) at an estimated $600k per custom TLD.

Yes, there’s clearly only a finite collection of addresses you could mix up with just A-Z and 123; but somethings already happened today to address that. Even though I do have some initial gripes, I can agree that opening up the TLD space to arbitrary branding is overall a good idea — there was no need to bring Asian/Arabic/Cyrillic/Martian symbols into this.

Also, in the spirit of a double-whammy post; hooray for congress deciding that American citizens do have the right to own a gun. More of that over here please!

* May or may not exist.

While I seem to be on a blogging spree today I feel compelled to show you, my humble reader who will hopefully subscribe, this photo I snagged walking back to my flat today. Click it for full view.

Lame. As much as I love my girlfriend, I never want to be these two.

Also, Simon pointed out — and I agree — that these t-shirts don’t actually make sense.

From the BBC: Blogger arrests hit record high.

It’s OK, though, it’ll never happen here — I can almost smell the breath this false reassurance is uttered with.

While we in the west are laggardly operating with a slight more freedom; we are going in this exact direction, full speed ahead. My fear is that the peoples’ breaking point is far too late.