ICANN preps for multilingual interwibble
PAUL TWOMEY, HEAD OF ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), says the Internet will see massive change as hundreds of millions of people worldwide log on as first time surfers, demanding domains in their own languages.
Giving a lengthy interview to the San Francisco chronicle, Australian Twomey - who will resign from ICANN later this year after a six year stint as CEO - said ICANN's job to make the Internet accessible to all nationalities and language groups is similar to going through "a 15-story building that had red brick columns, and changing all those red bricks to multicolored bricks, and doing it in a way that makes certain the door is still open and the windows still work."
ICANN, a California nonprofit set up in 1998, has long been in charge of coordinating the Internet's address system and playing the role of interwibble plumber. Recently, however, there have been squeaks from the cheap seats about who should control the Internet and whether ICANN, which currently has ties to the U.S. Department of Commerce, should answer to the G12 instead.
Twomey dismissed the G12 suggestion as unnecessary but told the chronicle he agreed that his organisation's agreement with the US should expire and make way for ICANN to stand on its own.
As for multi-lingual domains, Twomey said he reckoned by "the first quarter of next year" a "series of countries - the northeast Asians, the Arabs, the Indians, the Arabic-speaking Farsi, south Asia if you like, and then the Bulgarians and the Greeks and the Russians," would all get in on the act.
Russian and Chinese politicos had the issue as a top priority, according to Twomey, adding "It's also a very high priority for India". This, said the ICANN chief, was because the Indian government was busy plonking down fibre in around 600,000 villages and whereas about 150 million people in India speak English, "the next billion don't".
ICANN's policy, therefore, would be "to bring the Internet to the next 300 to 400 million people in India," said Twomey. Problem is, it all gets a little complex with 22 official languages and 11 different scripts.
Twomey also addressed the issue of ensuring ICANN's mechanisms would work "from Norway to New Zealand," stressing the importance of a "single global technology".
"The TCP/IP protocol doesn't recognise geographic boundaries, it's a topological network. This is one of the geniuses of the Internet, why it's grown so quickly. We're very committed to promoting that," he said.
Twomey also echoed something the INQ had heard from an executive at Dell recently, saying the global economic downturn had, if anything, boosted internet traffic rather than decreasing it, noting "in periods of downturn people turn to the Internet".
"From what I've heard, generic top-level domains have not gone flat," he said, adding "they continue to grow".
Twomey hypothesised the reason for this was that "if people are losing their jobs, they may decide they want to set up home businesses, and if you set up a home business, one of the things you do is get yourself a domain name."
Either that or sit at home poking friends on Facebook and watching Internet pr0n, yes.
See here for a fuller version of the interview. µ
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...would work "from Norway to New Zealand,"
Oh, the irony, such a quote in an article about multilingual web and more Asians getting online!
Well this stinks. Can't English and its European pals rule like kings for a few more years? I LIKE English.
That might be really good for those locals, but will inevitably harm international search, as only sites who keeps roman characters URLs will be accesibles to everyone. Sometimes I like to browse chinese sites with google translator, but if the URL is in chinese, how can I type it?
If it's good enough for aviation...
Oh great, now we'll have a deluge of malicious URLs with untypable special characters and other ridiculous crap in them (right-to-left URLS?). The end result is going to be a huge security mess. I know I'm going to categorically block all URLs with these oddball characters in them.
I don't care about "international fairness" either. These regions can create their own networks that support these languages in URLs. Hell, they're the only ones who will be using them (legitimately) anyway.
"Twomey also addressed the issue of ensuring ICANN's mechanisms would work "from Norway to New Zealand," stressing the importance of a "single global technology"."
A Single Global Mission would be AIGreat Game Beta for All Creative Support Technology ...... and Present a Virtually Transparent Open CyberIntelAIgents Channel with Remote PseudoBinary/ParadDigital Control GUI .... and NINJA PlugIn with EMPhaSIS for a QuITe Sterling Semantic CNXXXXion.
Spooky West to East Quantum Intellectual Property Transfer for IT Use and ITs Use against Abuse with Self Administered Personified Destruction .... Surge Purge BetaTesting...... ESPecial Forces in Training and Cover Cloud Operations....... which sounds very much like a Military Defence Shift and Intelligence Coup Delivery Call Facility/Question of Westernised Intelligence Serving Officers.
Rewriting the Past is no Way to Spend Time in the Future which Really One Only Requires Simple Great Imagination Shared, to Present IT Realised, Virtually, in Advancing Cloning Circuit IntelAIGent Loops....... SunNI HotShot Source Spot Markets.
1. Buy a Chinese keybaord if you are going to chinese sites that frequently.
2. Add the stupid Language Bar to Windows, and set up the Chinese Input Language via Regional and Language Options.
Don't freak out people, you've been able to input chinese characters all along.
Honestly, ever since Internet got to non-western countries, it has needed expansion of characters. The whole point in DNS is to give easily remembered & descriptive names to servers.
Adding IDNs so that other nations and regions can use their own language will do nothing to interrupt the flow of w/e to your desktop. You can still search for your favorite puppy pictures in English, and you can still search for your favorite non-Roman character sites, too.
IDNs will ADD to the internet, not take away. It will add accessibility for billions of people who are currently excluded, who, yes, WILL build their own networks, and then - guess what? Add them to the internet. That's exactly what the internet is, an amalgamation of individual networks.
Nobody is going to force *you* to go search through the networks you have no interest in, so calm yourself.
Things change over time. Deal with it.
I for one think that this change is long overdue, and that it will have a fantastic and positive effect on the internet and the world as a whole in terms of opening vast new areas of open communication.