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.tube registry claims victory in linkification fight

Kevin Murphy, September 26, 2023, 17:46:44 (UTC), Domain Tech

Latin American Telecom, the company that runs the .tube gTLD, has claimed victory in its fight to get popular social media apps to “linkify” more than 400 TLDs that have gone live in the last eight years.

As I reported two weeks ago, CEO Rami Schwartz managed to figure out that any TLD that entered the root after November 2015 wasn’t being recognized by apps such as WhatsApp, the world’s most-popular messaging app.

This meant that any attempt to share a URL in .tube or 467 other TLDs (including major dot-brands and geo-gTLDs) would be frustrated by the fact that WhatsApp would not automatically turn the URL into a clickable link.

The root cause of the problem appeared to be a library used in the Android operating system, which had a hard-coded list of valid TLDs that had not been updated since November 2015.

In a press release today, the registry reported that the library in question was updated on September 11 (hey, that’s the same day I published my article!) with a brand-new list of TLDs.

So it seems the linkification issue will be solved, once the updated software actually makes it to affected devices.

There are not many TLDs in the pipeline for delegation for the next four years — maybe some contested 2012-round stragglers and the odd IDN ccTLD — so this particular issue is unlikely to cause much more upset for a while.

“This story exemplifies how the perseverance of a small company unearthed a Universal Acceptance issue of global significance, rallying the support of industry leaders and setting a precedent for cooperation that can positively impact billions of internet users,” the registry said in its press release.

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