ICANN approves multilingual Internet address characters
We may see Amharic or Ge'ez (Ethiopian languages) being used for web address soon. It is reported that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a non-profit global regulatory body, last week approved a new multilingual Internet address system which it said would open up the Internet to millions more people worldwide. For now only 20 languages have been approved, and Ethiopia's Ge'ez characters are not among them.
ICANN announced an end to the exclusive use of Latin characters for website addresses. In future it will be possible to write an entire website address in any of the world’s language scripts.
With the introduction of “internationalised” domain names (IDNs), scripts such as Chinese, Korean or Arabic will eventually be usable in the last part of an address name — the part after the dot, as in .com and .org.
ICANN's decision has been hailed as one of the major technological developments since the Internet was invented in the United States some 40 years ago. ICANN says web surfing now will become easier for millions of people around the world who are not familiar with Latin characters or do not want to use them.
At present, technological restrictions mean all domain names end in letters from the Latin alphabet.
“This is only the first step but it is an incredibly big one and a historic move toward the internationalisation of the Internet,” said Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s president and CEO, in a statement following a six-day conference in Seoul.
“We just made the Internet much more accessible to millions of people in regions such as Asia, the Middle East and Russia.”
In China, the use of non-Latin characters from start to finish for Internet domain names could see a massive expansion of Internet use and commerce, experts predict. Any organizations or individuals in China could apply for a domain names in Chinese characters to 43 domestic website companies authorized by the CNNIC.
At first, IDNs will only be allowed on a limited basis involving country codes such as .kr for Korea. Eventually, their use will be hugely expanded to all types of Internet address names.
ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush said the introduction of IDNs follows years of work and study. “To see this finally start to unfold is to see the beginning of a historic change in the Internet and who uses it.”
Beckstrom said the change signifies that the Internet belongs to everyone, no matter what language they speak.
“The Internet is about bringing the world together and this will facilitate that effort.”
Thrush has described the new measure as the biggest technical change to the Internet for 40 years. It was approved a day after the 40th anniversary of the Internet’s birth in a computer experiment by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles.
ICANN says more than half the world’s 1.6 billion Internet users use languages with scripts that are not Latin-based.
The first applications for IDNs will be accepted by November 16 and the first is expected to be operative by mid-2010.
ICANN, a non-profit body formed in 1998 by the US government, was last month given more autonomy after Washington relaxed its control over how the Internet is run.
Cyber-Squatting
some Internet experts warn that the introduction of new rules means ample opportunities for cyber-squatters — those who register popular domain names in order to sell them later for a profit to legitimate owners, or people who will create malicious software or websites to engage in illegal activities.
Peter Wood, chief of operations at First Base Technologies, a London-based Internet security testing firm, explains that the introduction of non-Latin-based addresses can present cyber-squatters with an opportunity to register domain names that may look like the real thing but are not.
Wood tells RFE/RL that some Latin and Cyrillic characters look very similar and that popular domain names with Latin characters may be specifically targeted within the Cyrillic domain-names system.
"The Cyrillic character will have a different [computer] value but still appear the same. It's possible for someone who has got a criminal motivation to register a domain name that looks like, say 'example.com' and yet it actually doesn't say 'example.com.' It says 'example' but the 'a' in the middle is a Cyrillic 'a.' So it is actually a different character," Wood says.
It also presents an opportunity, Wood says, for someone to set up a website that masquerades as legitimate — for example one that processes financial transactions — and trick visitors to believe that they are on the real website.
Big multinational companies are aware of the possible domain-hijacking problems in non-Latin domain systems and are taking countermeasures.
Those measures, however, are not foolproof and still can be abused by cyber-squatters who react faster than the legitimate owner to register a popular domain name in a non-Latin language.
It is, as Wood explains, more like a cat-and-mouse game when the company has to rush and register all possible permutations of its brand name in a foreign language and characters.
In many countries there are well-developed legal frameworks to provide protection to owners of recognizable brand names on the web.
Weak Web Law
In countries with weaker Internet legislation, legitimate owners of brand names cannot always count on the local law to protect their rights.
"Most if not all of the domain-name authorities will not want to get involved in legal issues. And as a result it becomes just a matter of who has the most money or who can win in court," Wood says.
Andrei Vorobyev from the Russian Network Information Center, the official authority that assigns the .ru domain, says Russia now has more than 2.5 million domain names with the .ru suffix.
According to Vorobyev, Russia will start to register top-level domain names in Cyrillic characters on November 25.
In order to prevent cyber-squatting, Vorobyev says, Russia will employ a bidding system in the application for domain names.
Jeff MacGurn, senior solutions engineer at Covario, a San Diego-based Internet marketing company, tells RFE/RL that his firm is aware of the potential for domain-name hijacking in foreign languages and characters.
His firm, he says, is advising clients in Japan, China, and Russia to identify nonbrand terms that have good search volumes in their respective languages and to register those as fast as possible.
"As more and more domains become available, we are seeing this activity happen more and more. Cyber-squatters are trying to register the actual brand terms and they're also registering common misspellings of those domain names that look like the brand terms. We see this is becoming more and more prolific," MacGurn says.
While a domain name can be registered in minutes for less than $10 in the United States, registration in other parts of the world can cost hundreds of dollars and waiting periods can last weeks.
Christopher Laursen, the director of the European Domain Center, tells RFE/RL that rules for registration vary significantly from country to country.
"Any country can put restrictions on who can register a domain and for how many years," Laursen says.
He says that domain registration as a rule becomes more expensive in less-developed countries.
"Normally domain names are more expensive in the countries where there are restrictions and that also means that there is a lot of manual handling of documentation," Laursen says.
"For instance, in Germany it is all automated, basically. But in other countries, for instance Iran, it can take weeks to register a domain because the local administration has to go through these documents that we have to deliver to them."