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Internet closer to 'internationalization'
By siliconindia
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Tuesday, 17 November 2009, 15:29 IST |
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Egypt: In one of the most significant steps to make the internet more accessible around the globe, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has opened the application process, ending the exclusive use of Latin characters for website addresses.
"We have already received six applications from around the world for three different scripts," ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom told an Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Egypt's Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
He said that while ICANN could not reveal the names of those applying, Egypt - with .misr, meaning Egypt in Arabic - and Russia had already made public their applications for country code top level domains in their scripts.
With the introduction of 'internationalized' domain names (IDNs), scripts such as Chinese, Korean or Arabic will eventually be usable in the last part of an address name - the part after the dot, as in .com and .org.
"It's an historic moment. Of 1.6 billion internet users, more than half are born using languages that do not use Latin scripts, so this means that for more than half of users today of the internet, they will be able to type domain names entirely in their own language. It would take time to process the applications but hoped that by 2010 the entries would make it to the internet," said Beckstrom.
Egyptian Communication Minister Tarek Kamel said that the process would require 'strong investment in the coming phase'. "There will also be issues to deal with: linguistic, technical, legal, related to intellectual property and many other big challenges," said Kamel.