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: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.

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.