|
|
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is holding a conference in Seoul this week, where there will be an intense discussion and approval of writing internet domain names in native languages.
Earlier internet domain names could be written only in English. But on approval entire Internet addresses can be written in scripts that are not based on Latin letters but in native languages like Arabic, Hindi, Japanese and Cyrillic.
It could open up the web to more people around the world as addresses could be in their native languages. So .in may be written as .bharat and so on.
“This is the biggest change technically to the Internet since it was invented 40 years ago,'' said, Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board.
He also said, “It is a fantastically complicated technical feature and expects it to be granted in this meeting.''
According to Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's new president and CEO, once it is approved ICANN would begin accepting applications for non-English domain names which may start as early as in mid 2010.
He said that the translation system would help the diverse scripts to be converted to the right addresses.
He also said, “We're confident that it works because we've been testing it now for a couple of years. And so we're really ready to start rolling it out.''
Statistics say that out of 1.6 billion Internet users worldwide more than half use languages that have scripts based on alphabets other than Latin.
“So this change is very much necessary for not only half the world's Internet users today, but more than half of probably the future users as the use of the Internet continues to spread,” Beckstrom said.
