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

As my old history teacher used to say ...

[with_him]

"I blame the communist!"

Re:Make 'em all speak english

[igb]

Amusingly, when the issue is non-UTF8 character sets, or censorship, or anything else that upsets the non-Western countries, they start shouting threats like ``Turkey will start its own top-level domains'' or ``Iran will disconnect from the Internet''. Which I'm sure is terribly impressive in UN-type meetings where we're supposed to pretend that all countries' opinions matter, but in the real world is an entirely hollow threat.

Were some random non-UTF8 country to make interworking with the rest of the Internet harder, it would be cutting its nose off to spite its face. For the G7 countries (yes, G7, not G8), the value of Internet connectivity to random minor countries is minimal. The value to those countries of Internet connectivity is large. Do US users care if Uzbekistan is on the Internet? No: it has zero impact on 99% of them, minimal impact on 0.9% of them, etc. Do people in Uzbekistan care about being able to access Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, CNN, the BBC? I rather think they do.

No one likes pointing out to random minor countries that their presence on the Internet is far more in their interest than it is in anyone else's. But that doesn't make it any the less true. So, in general terms, the choice they're getting is ``largely anglophone, largely UTF-8, or nothing''.

ian

Re:Make 'em all speak english

[Shaper_pmp]

At the risk of sounding like a cultural chauvenist... because we invented the damn internet, and we speak English, and use the Latin-1 character set.

If individual countries want to implement their own DNS-equivalents in their national character set them more power to'em, I say. However, they'll also have to deal with upgrading every DNS-capable application on every machine in the country, then find a solution to the massive problem of phishing they've just caused by introducing two identical-looking (but numerically different) characters... and then find a way to enable other nationalities to type and use those URLs without necessarily having the characters on their keyboards or character-sets on their machines.

I honestly don't see a way around this.

Fixed

[Anonymous Coward]

'The internet is like a fifteen story building, and it's as if for some reason these middle eastern guys want to fly a plane into it.'

Re:Changing a system

[minion]

But it's not working. Mainly for all those people that want non-latin characters. It's been broken from the beginning. Sure, there is historical reasons why we have the system we do, but change is definitely needed. Twomey is right that a change can't be rushed and it needs to be done right (for reasons of security, compatibility, stability, etc). However, the change does need to occur and there needs to be some level of pressure to ensure that it happens.
 
I'd say its working quite well. I'm sorry that there are 50,000 other characters that you can't use as a doman name, but guess what? There's not room on my keyboard for 50,000 more characters.
 
Lets give some reasons why it is historical:
 
1) Westerns invented this technology
2) Westerners were smart enough to shrink their alaphabet to something manageable
3)Trying to include support for these foreign lanauges in a domain name is bad, on a data-entry scale. How are you going to type this? You're not, you're going to use some crappy program that lets you select 1 of the 50,000 characters to enter as your URL, 1 at a time.
4) Don't like it, invent some new internet and get people using that one instead.
 
5)Someone else pointed out that Kanji is easy to type on a latin keyboard. Thats great. I'll be dammed if I need to switch my from latin to kanji to arabic to kanji to latin just to use the internet every day. Thats why we have 1, universal character set for DNS. And it works quite well, even for non latin based languages.
 
I'm tired of people saying we're not helping them. We're trashing their heritage. Your lack of support for our lanauges is an insult... Whine whine whine! Get over it people. You come to market first with something, and then perhap's we make accomidations to use your technology.