The board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers – or ICANN – voted to allow such scripts in so-called domain names at the conclusion of a weeklong meeting in Seoul, South Korea’s capital.

The unopposed decision was welcomed by the board’s 15 voting members after following years of debate and testing.

The result clears the way for governments or their designees to submit requests for specific names, likely beginning Nov. 16. Internet users could start seeing them in use early next year, particularly in Arabic, Chinese and other scripts in which demand has been among the highest, ICANN officials say.

Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s CEO, said ahead of the vote that it represented one small step for ICANN but one big step for half of mankind who use non-Latin scripts

Domain names – the Internet addresses that end in “.com” and other suffixes – are the key monikers behind every Web site, e-mail address and Twitter post.

Since their creation in the 1980s, domain names have been limited to the 26 characters in the Latin alphabet used in English – A-Z – as well as 10 numerals and the hyphen. Technical tricks have been used to allow portions of the Internet address to use other scripts, but until now, the suffix had to use those 37 characters.

Now, ICANN is allowing those same technical tricks to apply to the suffix as well, allowing the Internet to be truly multilingual.

Many of the estimated 1.5 billion people online use languages such as Chinese, Thai, Arabic and Japanese, which have writing systems entirely different from English, French, German, Indonesian, Swahili and others that use Latin characters.

The Internet would become more accessible to users with lower incomes and education, said Yu, CEO of Analysys International, an Internet research and consulting firm in Beijing who was speaking before the widely expected decision.

Countries can only request one suffix for each of their official languages, and the suffix must somehow reflect the name of the country or its abbreviation.

Non-Latin versions of “.com” and “.org” won’t be permitted for at least a few more years as ICANN considers broader policy questions such as whether the incumbent operator of “.com” should automatically get a Chinese version, or whether that more properly goes to China, as its government insists.

ICANN also is initially prohibiting Latin suffixes that go beyond the 37 already-permitted characters. That means suffixes won’t be able to include tildes, accent marks and other special characters.

And software developers still have to make sure their applications work with the non-Latin scripts. Major Web browsers already support them, but not all e-mail programs do.

Although the move will reflect linguistic and cultural diversity, Guo, researcher who studies Internet use for the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said, “for some users it might even be easier to type domains in Latin alphabets than Chinese characters.”

China is among a handful of countries that has pushed hardest for official non-Latin suffixes and could be one of the first to make one available, said Tina Dam, the ICANN senior director for internationalized domain names. The other countries, she said, are Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

About 50 such names are likely to be approved in the first few years.

Beckstrom said Friday’s approval is not simply aimed at enhancing convenience for Internet users using different scripts. He further added that it was also an issue of pride of people and their own culture and their own language, and a recognition that the Internet belonged to everyone.

Source: http://physorg.com/news176099055.html

Share on Facebook