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Google grabs slice of interwebs for EVERYONE (who speaks Japanese)

Chocolate Factory claims first gTLD with Japanese suffix

Google has announced its first successful move into new gTLDs with the launch of .みんな for the Japanese market.

The registration is the world’s first open top-level domain in hiragana, one of the three scripts used to read and write Japanese, according to the web giant.

Written in the Roman alphabet as “minna”, the word literally means “everyone” in Japanese, and “suggests multiple people doing things together”, business product manager Vishal Jain wrote in a blog post.

“Our vision is for .みんな to be a collaborative space, where folks can build online communities — something along the lines of ‘Cook, everybody!’ or ‘Run, everybody!’,” he continued.

“But that’s just a thought. We can’t wait to see what new ideas the new domain will help make possible.”

Given the homogeneity of Japanese society and the herd mentality, it could prove a popular suffix, although like all new gTLDs, there’s absolutely no guarantee that the domain won’t be a gigantic waste of time and money.

That hasn’t stopped the Chocolate Factory applying for a huge list of over 100 new domains.

If the Choc Factory is successful with all of those, the bill would come in at somewhere around $20m for the registrations alone – no doubt a small price for Google to pay to get its pawprints on more of the interwebs.

Other domains in international scripts the web giant has applied for include “グーグル”- which is “Google” written in katakana, the script used in Japanese for loan words – and 谷歌, which is "Google" in Chinese.

Any businesses or individuals wanting to register a site on .みんな can do so through one of Google’s many registrar partners here. ®

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