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.'"

Comments

Re:Why bother

[winkydink]

Don't kid yourself. This is all about money. Lots and lots of money to be made from registration fees as companies line up to protect their trademarks and domain parkers line up to bottom-feed.

This negates the entire purpose of DNS

[Rix]

If it's going to use characters not present on normal keyboards, what's the point? Why not just use IP addresses?

Re:This negates the entire purpose of DNS

[griffjon]

Actually, if you RTFA, ICANN's failure to do this so far has caused increased fragmentation, as countries have implemented their own, only-works-here solutions:

At least a dozen countries, including China and Saudi Arabia, have created their own domains in different alphabets and their own Internets to support these domains. A Russian newspaper article last July reported that President Vladimir Putin was commissioning the creation of a Cyrillic Internet. Users of Russia's Internet, like current users of China's and Saudi Arabia's, could surf the Web without going through U.S.-controlled ICANN servers.

"We have been told so many times it will be next year and next year and next year that ICANN will make" multilingual domains work, said Alexei Sozonov, chief executive of Regtime, a Russian domain registrar. "So countries now have their own deployments."

Now, of course, most of these countries have their own issues about Internet connectivity and interoperability, but this at least is one less acceptable reason they behave that way.

The "Balkanisation" of the Internet

[hackershandbook]

What next will they think of? The idea of a "Russian *Internet*" or a "Chinese *Internet*" just makes me laugh!! As for accusations of "cultural imperialism" - can I just point out that English speaking people developed the Internet at their own time and expense (and a lot of tax-payers money) - so they are entitled to have it in English if they want .. this is daft - just plain daft ... when we look back at this moment and realise that we opened the can of worms that led to a 21st C. "Tower of Babel" - we will weep ...

Re:The "Balkanisation" of the Internet

[Pfhorrest]

As for accusations of "cultural imperialism" - can I just point out that English speaking people developed the Internet at their own time and expense (and a lot of tax-payers money) - so they are entitled to have it in English if they want And other countries are free to develop their own networks in their own languages and scripts if they want.

I agree that segregating the Internet into separate "internets" for particular countries is a bad idea; however, if other people want to have networks that operate in their native languages, who are we to tell them that they should stop that and be forced to use English instead? Wouldn't it be better to just make the Internet (the one that we have now, predominantly English) capable of supporting multiple languages, so that if and when people want to build networks in other languages, they're at least connectable to our internet, even if we can't type the domain names directly from our English keyboards? The alternatives are either making everyone build their networks in English, which WOULD be cultural imperialism, or ignoring the pressure for multilingual networks to the point that completely incompatible non-English alternatives spring up.

The world is already largely divided up by language. I doubt you (presumably a native English speaker in a predominantly English-speaking country) visit many Chinese websites written entirely in Chinese languages for Chinese speakers in China right now, even though their domains are written in 7-bit ASCII script like every other site on the Internet. This proposition won't make that any better, but it won't make it any worse either; and it holds the possibility of staving off the even worse alternative of completely separate, incompatible, non-ASCII "internets" springing up to meet the demands of these other peoples. At least with this multilingual system, an English site (with an ASCII domain) can link to a Chinese site (with a Hanzi domain). If China were to invent their own Hanzi-based DNS protocol, separate from our existing DNS protocol, not even that would be possible. Making our network multilingual actually prevents Balkanization more than it induces it.

Analogy with the official language of Aviation

[presidenteloco]

I don't think the computing world is ready for this yet, and it may never be a good idea.

Internationalization in software and operating systems is in a horrible state of excess
complexity right now. When everything top to bottom runs unicode UTF8 as its default
mode, then MAYBE.

But even then, there is a single language for Aviation communications (happens
to be English) but that is done so that there is some hope that everyone will know what
everyone is talking about, because everyone can learn the aviation subset of a single
natural language.

Also, most programming languages retain a small set of keywords in a single natural
language, so that most people will have a chance of learning that small set.

Simplicity-and-universality-first arguments maybe should win the day
for domain names too.

"Nationalized" domain names are one more step in the very unfortunate
trend toward balkanization of the Internet. The Internet is to some extent and
should continue to be one place where all people around the world start working
and communicating and trading and problem solving together. A Lingua Franca
is clearly needed if this is to remain true.