ICANN is the organization that records ownership of domains and what extensions, such as .com/.net/.org, can be used. They are the primary talk of this article and there is much controversy surrounding their role in regulating the internet. ICANN is a non-profit located in the U.S. whose only oversight is the US Department of Commerce. Many people are concerned with this because the internet is worldwide, yet the U.S. is the only nation to which it is accountable.
Given this history, we can now analyze the current issue, which is that of support for non-Roman language domain names. ICANN has been receiving a lot of pressure to, for example, have Chinese characters instead of .com in the suffix. While sites can have characters in the body portion (ex: www.google.com, google is the body), they can't change the suffix to anything in their native language.
On October 15th, ICANN will be testing 11 different non-Roman languages – Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil – using the native script in both the body and suffix of the web addresses. This will be interesting and I'm not sure whether or not it is a good decision.
My personal thoughts fall along the lines of what it means for worldwide communication. The predominant language for business, government, and in general official communication is English. According to D-Lib magazine in April 2003, 72% of all websites were written in English. I don't know how the trend has changed, but because of the overwhelming number of blogs and user content generated, I don't know how much that has changed... I'm ultimately afraid that it will cause more problems in the system. I, and many others I know, have a hard enough time dealing with websites that end in .org vs. .com. Imagine wanting to visit another country or speaking a different language and doing research... Things become even more difficult and even harder to discern. Although it can be done, is it necessary or efficient? Only time will tell.
Original Article: Click Here!
D-Lib Magazine Article: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april03/lavoie/04lavoie.html
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Very interesting post, thanks for bringing this issue to light. I wonder what other experts think about this? Are there any political or economic ramifications (both positive and negative) for expanding domain names across languages? What do you think?
Thanks, Steve. Other experts are torn on the issue as well. I think it really depends on the values people have to determine whether or not to do it. For efficiencies sake, we should keep it in English, for Global Simplicities sake, we should make it language-specific.
The political ramifications are quite prominent, especially considering that ICANN is only subject to the US, versus something like the UN. This in itself could result in a very fragmented approach to adding languages, because it doesn't have the experience of dealing with these issues as the UN does. If we do allow foreign languages, I think ICANN should be under UN oversight.
As for economic impacts, it is economically beneficial for English speakers to leave the system with only English, yet detrimental to foreign language speakers who have to learn the meaning of the English endings. It's flipped the other way around if we do allow foreign languages.
Post a Comment