Worth reading if you haven't

[IDN.TV]

Challenge to US control of website names
By Frances Williams in Geneva
Published: May 12 2006 18:42 | Last updated: May 12 2006 18:42

Fed up with the lack of an international system for internet addresses using non-western scripts, many countries are joining China in creating their own.


These moves are seen as a direct challenge to the authority of the US-based body that runs the international domain name system and a potential threat to the universality of the worldwide web.

A United Nations-sponsored meeting on the multilingual internet this week called for faster progress in introducing so-called internationalised domain names (IDNs), which are seen as an essential tool in spreading internet use and combating the digital divide between rich and poor nations.

Icann (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), which operates the global internet address system under the authority of the US commerce department, has been working for several years on IDNs and says it will be ready to start technical tests of an international naming system later this year.

But many countries have not bothered to wait and, like China, have found their own technical solutions. According to Subramanian Subbiah, co-founder of i-DNS.net, a Singapore company that sells internet domain names based on non-Roman characters, 2m such names have been registered since 1999 in nearly 40 countries.

Although 90 per cent of these names are in Chinese, Japanese and Korean – which share a common character set – other countries using IDNs include India, Thailand, Russia, Greece, Brazil, Israel, Iran and a number of Arab states.

Icann has been wrestling with the technical problems of ensuring that a web address typed in any language directs users to the same site.

But Robert Shaw, internet adviser to the Geneva-based International Telecommunication Union, says countries are putting a higher priority on accessibility in their own language than on the “pure” Icann notion of a seamless global internet.

So far, the development of IDNs outside Icann has not compromised global interconnectivity because they relate to country domains, like .cn (China) or .jp (Japan), where addresses are allocated at a national level based on numbers assigned by Icann.

But in March this year China announced that it was creating Chinese language versions not only of .cn but also of “top level” domains such as .com and .net that are ostensibly the preserve of Icann. Arab countries, Israel and Iran also have plans for IDN versions of top-level domains.

This has increased pressure on Icann to devolve these addressing decisions to regional or local bodies familiar with the language, Mr Shaw said.

[blastfromthepast]

Icann has been wrestling with the technical problems of ensuring that a web address typed in any language directs users to the same site.

Why should it? This is not a problem. I don't want to type in "diamonds".com in Japanese, and be led to a site in Africa, I want a Japanese diamonds page. When I type in "diamonds".com in Russian, I expect to see a Russian merchant of diamonds.

This whole article shows a remarkable lack of understanding of how domain names, and indeed how the whole internet naming system works.

[bwhhisc]

This article is requoting old news from late March or April that was later retracted by Chinese authorities. It is going to be impossible to get the idn genie back in the bottle once IE7 gets legs and people start seeing advertising and typing urls in native scripts.

[IDN.TV]

I know its old news but why are these sites publishing old news, is it just fill the space up in their article sections. Blast you are totally right, I am:o shocked seeing how little people know about IDNs and how wrong these journalists could be, and they have worded it completly wrong, why would ICANN want the sites searched in different languages be routed to the ascii ones..

[Rubber Duck]

Originally Posted by IDN.TV

I know its old news but why are these sites publishing old news, is it just fill the space up in their article sections. Blast you are totally right, I am:o shocked seeing how little people know about IDNs and how wrong these journalists could be, and they have worded it completly wrong, why would ICANN want the sites searched in different languages be routed to the ascii ones..

Yes, journalism these days seems to comprise mainly interviewing a mate of yours over a cup of coffee and then writing an article on a subject neither of you know anything about.

[Olney]

It's old, it's incorrect... The staments were corrected ages ago....
But they are not the ones posting it across multiple forums telling people it's a must read...

[IDN.TV]

Originally Posted by Olney

It's old, it's incorrect... The staments were corrected ages ago....
But they are not the ones posting it across multiple forums telling people it's a must read...

You are right olney, just wanted to show people how latest news can be totally wrong about IDNs, you can delete the thread if you like.