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NEW YORK: The Roman alphabet will lose some of its dominance of the
Internet beginning Monday when the organization overseeing website
addresses starts testing 11 new languages for domain names.
In a long-awaited break from its devotion to the
Roman alphabet, ICANN—the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names
and Numbers—announced Thursday that it will test registering
website domain names in Arabic, Persian, Russian, Hindi, Greek,
Korean, Hebrew, Japanese, Tamil, and both simplified and traditional
Chinese.
“This will be one of the biggest changes to
the Internet since it was created,” said Paul Twomey, ICAAN
president and chief executive.
People creating web addresses with non-Roman
lettering will be routed to a wiki page and required to use
“.test” instead of commonly used domain name endings such as
.com, .net, .org, or dots before country abbreviations.
A wiki is an online page that allows visitors to
make edits or other changes to content.
The results of the test will determine whether
ICANN sanctions using languages written in alphabets other than
English for complete domain names.
Presently, website creators can use other
language characters before the dots in website addresses, but
endings must be in English characters such as .com or .net.
“Right now only the ASCII characters A through
Z are available for use in top level labels, the part of the address
after the dot,” Twomey explained.
“Users will be able to have their name in
their language for their Internet when full [domain name]
implementation makes available tens of thousands of characters from
the languages of world.”
US-based ICANN has been blasted in the past by
critics who have accused it of an English-centric approach to
website addresses on the global Internet.
S. Subbiah, co-inventor of the first
multilingual domain technology, told the Washington Post that he
went to ICANN’s chief executive nearly a decade ago with a way to
expand beyond English letters.
“The response was basically, ‘I’m too
busy. Go learn English,’” Subbiah said.
“There’s . . . a little anti-American
rock-throwing in that description,” ICCAN’s first chief
executive, Mike Roberts, said in reply.
“The engineers thought that trying to do the
non-Roman alphabet thing with all this growth would destabilize the
Internet and cause crashes.”
This test is ICANN’s most important step to
date toward multilingual domain names, according to Twomey.
Twomey said he hopes people will push the test
“to its limits” so the platform can be perfected.
Approximately 37 percent of the world’s
Internet users are in Asia and another 2 percent are in the Middle
East, while 47 percent are in North America and Europe, according to
the Internet World Statistics website.
“There are a billion people on the Internet,
which means there are 5 billion not on it,” Paul Hoffman, a Santa
Cruz, California-based programmer who created the standards behind
the so-called internationalized domain names, said in the Wall
Street Journal.
“The new names “are not for the current
users, but for the next billion.”
--AFP
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