ICANN Under Pressure Over Non-Latin Characters

RidcullyTheBrown writes "A story from the Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that ICANN is under pressure to introduce non-Latin characters into DNS names sooner rather than later. The effort is being spearheaded by nations in the Middle East and Asia. Currently there are only 37 characters usable in DNS entries, out of an estimated 50,000 that would be usable if ICANN changed naming restrictions. Given that some bind implementations still barf on an underscore, is this really premature?" From the article: "Plans to fast-track the introduction of non-English characters in website domain names could 'break the whole internet', warns ICANN chief executive Paul Twomey ... Twomey refuses to rush the process, and is currently conducting 'laboratory testing' to ensure that nothing can go wrong. 'The internet is like a fifteen story building, and with international domain names what we're trying to do is change the bricks in the basement,' he said. 'If we change the bricks there's all these layers of code above the DNS ... we have to make sure that if we change the system, the rest is all going to work.'" Given that some societies have used non-Latin characters for thousands of years, is this a bit late in coming?

Comments

Re:Um... why?

[CRCulver]

Languages are anachronisms, the only reason we have more than one is the physical distance between locations and difficulty travelling allowed them to evolve independently.

So why does every language have strata of slang and jargon that may well be incomprehensible to outsiders? In south-east England, a fairly small area, one has a wide range of speech depending on economic status and social circle. If one has a few people speaking a common language, it won't stay uniform for long, even if everyone's still in the same place.

So get rid of them, insist on a common language.

Sure, and why don't we just all wear the same clothes, just because different styles or colours can be taken too seriously (on gang turf, for example)? And let's all eat the same food, no need for various cuisines when flavourless mush can keep us alive.

Languages make the world more interesting. I enjoy very much traveling about and seeing how the local communicate, the phonological inventory and morphological quirks they employ, the different judgements on eloquent speech they hold. If all this disappeared, it would be very dull.

And your claim that languages are "too difficult" is a peculiar opinion of some in first world nations. The vast majority of human beings are multilingual, see e.g. Edwards, John. Multilingualism (London: Penguin, 1994). It should only take a person a couple of weeks to acheive a basic conversational level in a foreign language, which can easily be done before each time you set off on vacation. I've never had a problem learning enough of the language to talk with the locals about their culture and mine, and I think my language skills are actually fairly humdrum in comparison to a lot of people I've met.

And if all national tongues disappear in favour of some world language imposed by fiat, what would happen to all the literature written in them? Poetry translates infamously poorly. People have spent millennia composing art in words, one of the skills that makes us the unique species we are. Are we to throw all of those great monuments away?

The GNS System?

[Kadin2048]

Kind of an interesting point. Maybe we should just let Google run the DNS system, and just replace it with a giant search engine. If we make actually typing in a web address hard enough, then that's what we're effectively doing anyway: people will just start typing everything (including the domain name of sites they want to go to) into the Google Search box at the top of their browser window, instead of the actual address bar.

Actually, DNS arguably is a giant search engine, which simply works on a 1:1 relationship and uses a distributed database (you input one piece of information, and it gives you some corresponding piece of information back). Replacing it with a 'fuzzier' search engine that would give you back a number of results, ranked by relevance, isn't that huge a leap.