In a historic decision, the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has voted to allow scripts other than Latin in the suffix of domain names. This board meeting took place in Seoul, South Korea’s capital on September 30, 2009. As pointed out by me in an earlier article, it may be mentioned that the first part of a domain name, i.e., the prefix (such as “techsuperb” in “techsuperb.com”) was already allowed to be in a different language or in a character set other than Latin (or Roman), in certain situations. However, till date, the second part of a domain name, i.e., the suffix (such as “com” or “net” or “org”), was still required to be compulsorily in Latin characters. However, with this new decision taken by ICANN, now it will be possible to write the full domain name (including the suffix also) in languages other than English. But, while taking this decision, ICANN has stated that initially the native languages could be used for the suffix of the domain names only for the country-code top level domains, i.e., those with endings like .cn for China and .ru for Russia. The so-called generic top-level domain names such as “.com”, “.net” and “.org” will continue to be in English characters at this stage. At a later stage, even these generic top-level domain names may also be allowed to be written in the non-English languages or the non-Latin characters.
This decision of ICANN will allow the Internet to be truly multi-lingual. The contents of the web pages and the whole web sites could already be in non-English languages. You can notice a large number of websites in languages such as Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, Korean, Hebrew, French, Japanese, etc. Now, the domain names also can be fully in such languages, though initially it will only be for the country-code top level domains such as .cn, .ru, .us, .uk, .kr, .in, and so on.
ICANN’s President and CEO Rod Beckstrom has described this move as “…only the first step, but it is an incredibly big one and a historic move toward the internationalization of the Internet”. This decision meets the demand of several Governments, such as the China Government, to allow domain names to be fully expressed in their own languages so that people in those countries do not have to use English characters if they don’t know that language. It may be pointed out that in many developing and under-developed countries, the literacy levels are low, and moreover, even amongst the literates the knowledge of English language is not common. In that sense, this decision would help in spreading the Internet to newer territories over time.
For the information of those who are not aware, ICANN is an internationally organized, public benefit non-profit company and is responsible for the global coordination of the Internet’s system of unique identifiers like domain names (such as .com, .org, and country codes like .uk) and the addresses used in a variety of Internet protocols that help computers reach one-another over the Internet.
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