Globalizing URLs

According to an article in The Globe and Mail, "Today, the U.S. organization in charge of overseeing and regulating domain names online, is to launch 11 test sites in languages that don't use the Roman alphabet." This would make the internet far more international by allowing people in other countries to use their native alphabets to type URL addresses. As things stand, people typing in Russian, Japanese, or Arabic still have to type roman character suffixes (like .com) at the end of their addresses--although since 2003, they have been able to use their own scripts for the rest of the addresses. Also, there is currently no way of typing diacritical marks over the Roman characters; when typing URLs, French people are unable to use the accents which appear over their "e"s.

Although many people who speak languages other than English are glad of this attempt toward internationalization, some are frustrated because it means that they will have to pay for an additional domain name for their businesses. Instead of simply paying for the current Roman-character name, they will have to pay for the name using another alphabet as well, or else another company could create a competing site using the other alphabet. Despite this, it seems to me that this internationalization of the internet will be beneficial in the long run, making the internet easier to use for many people around the world.

The test pages in non-Roman scripts "will allow Internet users to establish subpages, leave comments and test how well the IDNs link to their pages, according to a statement from ICANN. The organization expects to begin offering working addresses that use non-Roman suffixes toward the end of 2008." ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a US nonprofit organization has been working to shift the internet to other scripts since the year 2000, but according to the Globe and Mail article, this shift has never been one of ICANN's top priorities.

Looking into the background of ICANN, I found that it is a California based organization founded in 1998. Its primary concern is the introduction of top-level domains. (A top level domain is a suffix such as .com) According to ICANN's own website "ICANN is responsible for the global coordination of the Internet's system of unique identifiers. These include domain names (like .org, .museum and country codes like .UK), as well as the addresses used in a variety of Internet protocols. Computers use these identifiers to reach each other over the Internet. Careful management of these resources is vital to the Internet's operation, so ICANN's global stakeholders meet regularly to develop policies that ensure the Internet's ongoing security and stability." This would suggest that although ICANN has been a bit slow at shifting its top-level domains to use non-Roman scripts, its delay has been caused by caution rather than insouciance. In adapting the internet to new languages, the ICANN must be careful to avoid compromising the stability of the internet. Nevertheless, it must strive to convert to other scripts as quickly as possible to avoid creating international tensions; although it is US based, it must avoid appearing as overly favoring to US interests or else it will offend the global community. In general, people find it extraordinarily offensive to have foreign languages forced upon them, and few people in foreign countries would gladly be made to use English. Many view the US's refusal to relinquish control over the internet as an act of US vanity and refusal to participate as an equal in world affairs. By developing other languages on the internet, the ICANN as a US company, helps to lessen some of these international tensions.