Aplus.net Blog

It’s a problem that needed to be addressed eventually — long ago, say many people. But even those people may admit that it’s an extremely difficult problem to solve. And hence, the delay.

We’re referring to today’s news from the Washington Post that ICANN is ramping up testing of domain names in alternate alphabets. (Click here to read the original article, “A Script for Every Surfer”)

Since the Internet came into widespread use, those among the 70 percent of the world that doesn’t speak English have argued that the Web is inaccessible. So next week the nonprofit group contracted by the U.S. government to run the Internet will begin testing domain names in other alphabets.

On Monday, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will conduct a test to see whether domains written entirely in foreign scripts can work without crashing the Net.

ICANN had already begun this process on a small scale by combining some non-English alphabets with English extensions — such as [Chinese text].com. However, today’s news announces a more concerted effort to resolve this longstanding issue.

The long road to this stage, which comes nearly a decade after the technology for creating multilingual domains was invented, has left many in the non-English-speaking world impatient and angry. Questions of political and linguistic sovereignty, alongside accusations of American “digital colonialism,” have motivated some countries to create their own Internets, effectively mounting a challenge to the World Wide Web.

Experts say the difficulties of typing in a foreign script have probably held back development of online economies abroad … Some advocates of internationalizing the Internet have accused ICANN of ignoring the needs of the developing world.

However, just summarizing the problems facing such an endeavor provides a good deal of insight as to why this development has been so long in coming:

Countries with slightly different versions of the same script have fought over spelling. Debates have also raged over which corporate, sovereign and ethnic interests should control which domains. VeriSign, for example, is the U.S. registry that manages all the domains that end in .com, which represent half of all the domains in the world. Should it also be given control over multilingual domains that end in some translated version of .com? Or should countries have the right to control all domains in their own national languages? What about languages that cross borders, such as Arabic?

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.

Some countries have taken matters into their own hands.

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.

Without coordination, some experts say, these new networks will increasingly fragment and destabilize the Internet.

Others say patching these countries’ Internets together into a “federation” of Internets could preserve global interconnectivity.

What do you think? Are there political reasons for the delay in this much-needed development? Or was it a natural delay based on the inherent difficulty in solving such a multi-pronged dilemma? Sound off in the comments section and let us know your thoughts.