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ICANN Mulling Multilingual URLs
griffjon writes "The Washington Post is reporting that ICANN is testing out fully multilingual domain names. These won't just be [non-western-language].com, but would have TLDs translated into other scripts, fixing annoyances for non-English speaking audiences. An example: 'Speakers of Hebrew, Arabic and any other language written from right to left must type half of the URL in one direction and the other half — the .com, .net or .org postscript — the opposite way.' Let's hope it goes better this time around: 'Next week's experiments use the domain name "example.test" translated into 11 languages. A previous model, however, used "hippopotamus" instead of "test." These plans went awry when an Israeli registrar realized the Hebrew word ICANN thought meant "hippopotamus" was an expletive and threatened to involve the Israeli government.'"
A URL is an entire address, including the protocol, local path and fragment identifier. This is a URL:
A domain name does not include the protocol, the local path or the fragment identifier. This is a domain name:
This is talking about domain names, not URLs. If anybody would talk about multilingual URLs, it would be the IETF, not ICANN, and they already have, they are called IRIs.