In a few weeks, the first-ever non-Latin character internet addresses will be online, thanks to the recent approval of the fast track process for internationalized domain names. The move is an exciting one indeed. With a huge portion of the globe speaking languages that don’t use Latin script, it is time the internet made room for them.
Chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers Peter Dengate says that this move will mark the biggest technical change to the internet since it was created four decades ago.
“Right now Internet address endings are limited to Latin characters – A to Z,” says Dengate. “But the Fast Track Process is the first step in bringing the 100,000 characters of the languages of the world online for domain names.”
The Fast Track process will launch November 16th of this year, and will allow nations and territories to apply for internet extensions that reflect their name. What’s special about this is that they will finally be able to apply for such names in their own national language’s characters.
ICANN’s president and CEO Rod Beckstorm said that this move would be a significant step towards the internationalization of the internet. Beckstrom encourages countries to participate, saying the first ones to give the new domain names a try will “help to bring the first of billions more people online – people who never use Roman characters in their daily lives.”
He makes a good point. For example, 321 million Chinese speakers are using the internet. This represents only one-third of the world’s total Chinese speakers. By the same token 42 million Arab speakers currently use the internet, representing only a quarter of the world’s total Arab-speaking population. The new move could allow more of these non-Latin based language speakers to come online.
The corporation is nearing the pinnacle of its years of testing, policy development, and global cooperation to prepare this fast track process.
In addition, ICANN is working towards opening up the generic top-level domain names to non-latin languages, as well as to latin-based ones. The expansion of generic top-level domain names will allow for more innovation, choice, and change to the internet’s addressing system, according to an ICANN statement.
All in all, it seems like the process of opening up the internet to the international community, and making it accessible to anyone, is well underway. We can only hope to benefit from the new options and new populations that the new online world will attract.
Kaila Krayewski is a freelance journalist with a passion for all things internet. Having worked for nearly two years as the public relations manager for an internation search engine optimization company, and publishing hundreds of articles (how-to, informational, and otherwise) on SEO, she knows a thing or two about the field. Furthermore, having just started up her own website blondetraveler.com, she is doing her best to keep one step ahead of the search engines in order to keep the traffic flowing.
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