ICANN to test non-English domain names
The Internet’s key oversight agency has outlined a plan for testing domain names entirely in non-English characters, bringing closer to reality a change highly sought by Asian and Arabic Internet users.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers announced a tentative timetable Tuesday that calls for tests to begin in the second half of the year. The tests would help ensure that introducing non-English suffixes wouldn’t wreck a global addressing system that millions of Internet users rely upon every day.
The Internet’s main traffic directories know only 37 characters: the 26 letters of the Latin script used in English, the 10 numerals and a hyphen.
Constraining non-English speakers to those characters is akin to forcing all English-speakers to type domains in Chinese. As a result, ICANN has faced pressures to adopt technical tricks that let the directories understand other languages.
[via nwsource]
March 17th | Domain Names | |
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