Web addresses may adopt non-English characters

The Internet may be getting friendlier for a significant chunk of the world. A proposal is up for a vote to let Web addresses use non-English characters.

The proposed change (PDF), known as Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), will allow the use of non-Latin characters in the entire address. Currently, such characters are allowed only in part of the address. IDNs will let people who write in Chinese, Korean, or Arabic use their own languages to surf the Web, and is expected to jump-start Internet use in many regions across the globe.

ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which is responsible for managing domain names on the Net, will review the historic, hot-button proposal on Friday at its six-day 36th International Public Meeting in Seoul. If approved, IDNs could kick in as early as mid-2010.

"This is an extremely important meeting for ICANN, since the IDN program is moving one step closer to reshaping the global Internet landscape," ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom said in a statement. "In Seoul, we plan to move forward to the next step in the internationalization of the Internet, which means that eventually people from every corner of the globe will be able to navigate much of the online world using their native language scripts."

IDNs are not a new concept. They've been debated for at least a decade. Some doubted whether such a system could work. But countries like China have taken the lead in pushing for this change.

Of the 1.6 billion Internet users worldwide, more than half use languages with character sets other than Latin. Beckstrom sees the change as necessary, not just now, but for the future as Internet use continues to grow.

One of the challenges behind IDNs has been the use of translation technology to convert one character set to another to deliver the right address. But ICANN seems to have covered that base.

"We're confident that it works because we've been testing it now for a couple of years," Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of ICANN's board, said in a statement. "And so we're really ready to start rolling it out."

[solitare_pax]

So what happens if a Chinese website that has the characters for say, "Xiang rou" is translated into something less tastefull?

We all know how tactless even the best translation programs can be...

[NervClaX]

Yes! Of course! Many languages! We all know how well this worked out for the city of Babel.

Why don't we translate the King James Bible into 1337 speak?

"4 God so <3 the wrld he gv hiz only sun." Jhn 3:16

[Static-X-Machina]

hhhhhyeah. This should work pretty well. When everyone knows every language and every keyboard has every character in every alphabet.
This idea IS NOVEL. I'll give it that.
Practical? Not so much.
I understand the need for a whole new world of addresses as somewhere in the future we will run out of name designations.... but I get the feeling we aren't even close to that scenario.
Have we really become so uncreative that we feel the need for about 50 to 60 different webpages all named the same thing in different langauges?
How spoiled we've become.

And to answer solitare_pax:
We end up with alot of offended/embarasses people when they type in a pr0n address instead of the actual address they intended.

Heck there was a time when I was in school that my instuctor was giving a tut on using IE4,
intended to go to the official whitehouse.gov website, went to whitehouse.com and got some kind of oval office oriented smut site. Mind you it was during the clinton administration and long about the time jennifer flowers and miss lewensky arrived on the scene.
Hilarious!
The old mans face turned a nice shade of red/purple.

I see no further need for this topic to see light of day. As a matter of fact, why would china push so hard for something like this?
Isn't Chinas internet already censored from the rest of the world?
What good does it even do for them?

[codynews]

Way to give up control of the Internet US! Whoever came up with that idea should be fired yesterday.

[eneref]

It's more than just allowing native speakers access. It's about allowing companies and organisations the right to use their own identity on the net instead of converting it into a linguistic scheme that is either non-standard or not easily accessible to all of their employees, members, customers, etc.

A lot of languages have transliterations to allow them to use the standard roman alphabet to type in internet addresses. But not all such transliterations are standard, and even the slightest mistake can provide disastrous results.

I think it's an excellent idea, but it will make it more difficult for some of us to have access to some web that we may currently be able to access. Still... it seems only fair. Mandarin is the single most spoken language in the world. To say that an Internet address can't be typed in Mandarin seems to be thumbing one's nose at the largest number of speakers in favour of a system that is not, even on the best of days, all that International.

[yfan]

Well, cody, the US doesn't control the Internet domain names. ICANN does. So, no one is giving up control of anything. Besides, I don't know why people don't realize this, but nearly every language that is spoken in the world is also spoken in the United States. There are Americans who speak Japanese, Chinese, Russian, etc. in addition to English.

Nonetheless, I agree that this whole idea of international characters in domain names can get tricky. For better or worse, there is a standard set of characters now (the Latin characters) that is damn nearly universal. Once you allow non-Latin-character domain names, each of those domain names will only be recognizable by and accessible to a small segment of the web population - only those that recognize those characters and can type them from their keyboard in some cases where translation goes bad. The Internet needs to be universal, and at the moment, Latin characters are universal.

[cristate67]

Up until recently the U.S. government controlled ICANN, and I believ the fact that the just gave up the control over it was exactly what he was talking about.

[Vegaman_Dan]

I simply won't be going to those websites. My traffic will stick with sites I can actually get to. That alone should be enough to make sure we stick with something simple and standard.

[leocorx]

In my opinion that's a silly idea. For the first time in all the ages we had the possibility to throw away Babel linguistic mess. Then we adopted that "localized keyboard."
I'm Italian. I can keep my language but have a "lingua franca" for everyday communications.
What's next step for incommunicability?
I know nobody decided for English rather than other languages -and this is no-democratic - but still, this is the de facto international language. Why can't we all just decide to adopt it, just and simply English?
And then , what's next step?Why not use localized programming languages too? :-P

[knowles2]

Exactly, what I want to say.
The language of the internet should stay english, it just keeps everything simple, easier an more productive.
This idea just adds a whole load of complications to the net that is not needed.

Mandarin may be the most spoken language, but even the Chinese government decided they wanted everyone to learn English. An I hear a rumour what they want they tend to get.

[jarturof]

not only asians, the second most spoken language by native speaker is spanish, and there is no "ñ" in the domains.

[reyjacobs]

You can always just type nya for now. Why don't we just go ahead and make URLs read from right to left too, to appease those who speak Hebrew. The whole idea is ridiculous. And what happens when you have yahoo.com and

yahàòó.com and yaháoo.com and yâhõö.com and yähoo.com and yãhóô.com -- and what about .com -- why not .cöm?? and yähòõ.com and yåhoö.com

Yes!!!! This will make the internet sooooooooooooóôõöòõoöòó much bettèr! (or is that béttêr?)

[madison540]

This will be tricky to say the least. This also will open the door to many more url spoofs. With so many characters in other languages that look like latin characters it will be easy to think you are following a legit link when in fact you are not.

[reyjacobs]

Let's open up case sensitivity while we're at it, so that google.com and gOogle.com and Google.com and GooGle.com can all be distinct and the Internet can become bloated with more phishing sites. And why not punctuation?? yahoo!.com and askjeeves?.com And we need spaces! Spaces! and return characters in URLS!!!!! and no length restrictions on domain names! and we need symbols like copyright and TM in the URLS too!!!

my
website
is
cool
because
of
return
characters
in
my
url
©
.com

[celticbrewer]

The problem has never been keyboards or reluctance on ICANN's part. The big issue here is getting all the DNS servers/routers/etc... in the world to support the alternate character sets. If it was so easy to update all those servers, we'd be using IPv6 completely but even that, a far more pressing issue, has not been done yet.

[reyjacobs]

Let the goobers in the rest of the world isolate themselves from the real world if they want. If they want their websites to only be read in backwater villages where they don't even have Internet--more power to them.

[jarturof]

I think there are more things outside the USA, there are characters in france like ç in spanish like ñ and many other from other countries, what about greeks, russians, arabs.

Is not closing, it is actually opening, so far the internet URL are closed to english characters. not event the eniter latin characters.

Not all sites what to be global, hulu.com is not avaible outside the USA, so the sites with adreses like "españa.com" will be targeted to spanish spspeaking people, while "françois.com" will be for french, and if the plan is to target the largest number of users.

1° Chinese
2° Spanish
3° English
4° India (with many dialects and languages)

There is so much more outside the USA, not all is backwater villages.

[born_yesterday]

There is only few people raised some good technical issues (security being one, because of the website address contain unrecognized characters). The rest of people appose it are just, what can you say, big 'F' [word] American. And they will change only when one day some spices from outside of earth show up.

[couldnotunregister]

The current character set is ROMAN not "English". I think the title is misleading and resulted in a lot of anglo-centric comments.

[aka_tripleB]

I think this is not a good economic decision. Putting non-standardized characters in web addresses will segment the internet and make the "world wide web" regional. No one will go to a site unless they can get to it on their keyboard.

[jarturof]

Have you ever looked at a keyboard from outside the USA??

http://images.google.com/images?hl=es&source=hp&q=greek%20keyboard&lr=&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi

http://images.google.com/images?hl=es&lr=&um=1&sa=1&q=russian+keyboard&btnG=Buscar+im%C3%A1genes&aq=f&oq=&start=0

http://images.google.com/images?hl=es&lr=&um=1&sa=1&q=korean+keyboard&btnG=Buscar+im%C3%A1genes&aq=f&oq=&start=0

There are different keyboard for different languages, CAN YOU BELIEVE IT!

[evolx24]

Are we not all already aware this is a plot by Toys 'R' Us to get that Russian backwards 'R' for their URL...?

This is a dumb idea, just as dumb as it would be to allow all these evil characters into programing languages, im not sure about you but finding syntax errors in code involving ôõöòõ, would just become a wonderful past time. English and the English Alphabet are a simple un-nuanced way to 'code' information, simple is better.

[reyjacobs]

Languages that use funky characters just need to simplify and update to Roman characters. Yes, I'm serious. Its just too much of a hassle typing all the swigglies. And a lot of the time, they are unnecessary anyway. It just results in a lot of text that can't be processed by machine just because there are too many different swiggly cases to take into account. The Romans were a lot more practice with their alfabet. PH for the f sound should also go the way of the dinosaur.

[heejaechang]

it is so funny that english speaker talking about things they have no idea what it meant. if you dont know/understand or havent experienced about it, why not just stay slience.

there are a lot of people who dont care about english, but just want to use internet. but they are forced to use english since domain name has to be written in english characters.

once that part is allowed to use non-english characters, people who dont need to read/write or hear ever about English, wouldnt need to see/use english characters when they use internet.

again, it is so funny that you guys assume that every people want/need to use/know English when they live.

...

anyway, pretty sure people will attack me about broken english, grammer bla bla about my post. so to save your time, I am not going to ever come back and read this post again, so dont bother attacking me unless just attacking behavior itself please yourself :p

...

[dotroy]

heejaechang -- As you have said "anyway, pretty sure people will attack me about broken english, grammer bla bla about my post. so to save your time, I am not going to ever come back and read this post again, so dont bother attacking me unless just attacking behavior itself please yourself :p"

Why are you scared that people will attack you ? Everyone has right to say what they think. My mother tongue is not English and I agree "non english URL" is a stupid idea. Internet is about universal access and only "ROMAN CHARACTER URL" can provide that. We do not need internet which can be used by only part of the people. If you do not want to learn English then live in your cave or browse site in your own language ...what are you doing here ?

Like most politician you probably promote ignorance so that you can trick them

[A41202813]

When I Do Not Know If A URL Is .COM, .NET, .ORG Or ".WHATEVER" I Use WIKIPEDIA, Because They Have The Right URL In Their Articles.

So, What About To Create An International Directory To Convert "Whatever Character Clickable Links" Into English Clickable Links And Vice Versa ?

[davcoh]

It exist since many years, but the problems came from the browsers. See here http://bit.ly/7KlXD for examples.

[someguynamedbob]

o god the internet is going to be vvvvvvvvvvvvvveeeeeeeerrrrrrrryyyyyyyyyy ssssssslllllllloooooowwwwwwww...........