The Malaysian Insider

SEOUL, Oct 31 — The non-profit body that oversees Internet addresses yesterday approved a new multilingual address system which, it said, would open up the Internet to millions more people worldwide.

The move by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) spelt the end to the exclusive use of Latin characters for website addresses. In future, it will be possible to write an entire website address in any of the world’s language scripts.

With the introduction of “internationalised” domain names (IDNs), scripts such as Chinese, Korean and Arabic will eventually be usable in the last part of an address name — the part after the dot, as in .com and .org.

At present, technological restrictions mean all domain names end in letters from the Latin alphabet.

“This is only the first step but it is an incredibly big one and a historic move towards the internationalisation of the Internet,” said Rod Beckstrom, Icann president and chief executive, in a statement after a six-day conference in Seoul.

“We just made the Internet much more accessible to millions of people in regions such as Asia, the Middle East and Russia.”

At first, IDNs will be allowed only on a limited basis involving country codes such as .kr for Korea. Eventually, their use will be hugely expanded to all types of Internet address names.

Icann chairman Peter Dengate Thrush said the introduction of IDNs followed years of work and study.

The result clears the way for governments or their designees to submit requests for specific names, likely to begin on Nov16.

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.

Since their creation in the 1980s, domain names have been limited to the 26 characters in the Latin alphabet used in English — A to 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.

That has meant Internet users with little or no knowledge of English might still have to type in Latin characters to access Web pages in Chinese or Arabic. Search engines can sometimes help users reach those sites, but companies still need to include Latin characters on billboards and other advertisements.

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 and others which use Latin characters.

“This is absolutely delightful news,” said Edward Yu, CEO of Analysys International, an Internet research and consulting firm in Beijing. He said the Net would become more accessible to users with lower incomes and education.

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” will not 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.

Icann also is initially prohibiting Latin suffixes that go beyond the 37 already-permitted 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.

China is among a handful of countries that have pushed hardest for official non-Latin suffixes and could be one of the first to make one available, said Tina Dam, Icann senior director for internationalised 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.

In China, researcher Guo Liang, who studies Internet use for the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the government’s top think-tank, questioned whether all Chinese would embrace the new domains.

Although the move will reflect linguistic and cultural diversity, he said, “for some users it might even be easier to type domains in Latin alphabets than Chinese characters”.

China has already set up its own “.com” in Chinese within its borders, using techniques that are not compatible with Internet systems around the world.

Icann, a non-profit body formed in 1998 by the US government, was last month given more autonomy after Washington relaxed its control over how the Internet is run.

Beckstrom said yesterday’s approval was not simply aimed at enhancing convenience for Internet users using different scripts.

“It’s also an issue of pride of people and their own culture and their own language, and a recognition that the Internet belongs to everyone.” — Straits Times