I'm pleased to announce the publication of The 2015 Web Globalization Report Card. Here are the top-scoring websites from the report... You'll notice that Google is once again ranked number one. The fact is, no other company on this list invests in web and software globalization like Google. While many software companies are happy to support 40 or even 50 languages on their websites, Google is looking at 60 or more languages across its many products. more
What exactly is that "reserved list of names" Fadi Chehadé refers to in his letter dated October the 22nd? If we already have an idea, we wonder if they considered protecting more than just "accents". The name of Hogan Lovells was mentioned in the last Safebrands "RINDD" and their input on this question is welcome if they are the company to be working on that list. more
On August 27, 2014, the world became a bit more connected as the Internet welcomed more than 400 million Hindi language speakers in their own language. .???? (.Bharat), which means India in the Hindi language, was inaugurated on August 27 in New Delhi by Mr. Ravi Shankar Prasad, India's Minister of Law & Justice and Communications & Information Technology. more
World Domain Day (WDD) was held in India for the first time last month where hundreds gathered to discuss domain names and related markets. Key topics included the announcement of soon to be available domains in a number of Indian languages. more
If your first language isn't English and you don't use the Latin character set you can and will run into barriers. While Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) i.e. domain names where either the left of the dot, the right of the dot or the entire string is in characters other than Latin ones, do exist and have existed for a number of years not all services work well with them. more
It has now been about eight months since I joined the Internet Society as the Director of Deployment & Operationalization and I still get asked on a fairly regular basis "what do you do?" Well, with ISOC's Chief Internet Technology Officer Leslie Daigle's recent departure, and with my time here having exceeded both my first 120 days and my first 6 months, this seems like the right moment to reflect on my brief tenure here so far and perhaps pontificate a bit on where we're going - and why. more
The United Nations International Telecommunications Union (ITU) announcement that by end 2014, there will be nearly three billion Internet users -- two-thirds of them from the developing world -- with mobile-broadband penetration approaching 32 per cent. This information is so timely that it needs to be put in proper perspective by asking: What will the majority of these two-thirds do online? And how do we in the ICANN community deliver on our mandate of serving the global public interest? more
When it comes to Internet addresses in China, use of digits have been preferred over letters for various reasons including ease of memorization. Christopher Beam from New Republic explains. more
Imagine if, every time you wanted to visit a website, you were expected to type in letters from a foreign language, or worse, an entirely foreign script, such as Arabic, Cyrillic, or Chinese. For more than a billion people, this is how they experience the Internet today. The Internet was designed to be global, but it was not designed to be multilingual. For decades, this limitation was most evident in website and email addresses, which permitted only a small set of Latin characters. more
Earlier this week dns.be launched Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs). The Belgian registry opted to support the accented characters for Dutch, French and German. In so doing they've also ended up providing support for other European languages, such as Swedish, Finnish and Danish... The registry reported quite a bit of interest in the launch with over 3000 IDN domains being registered in the first hour. That number had practically doubled by close of business on the first day. more
Today, Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO has released a statement concerning the linguistic diversity on the Internet stating: "UNESCO's experience and the 2012 study of the use of internationalized domain names undertaken with EURid show that the main challenges are technical. Obstacles lie with Internet browsers that do not consistently support non-ASCII characters, with limited e-mail functionality, and with the lack of support of non-ASCII characters in popular applications, websites and mobile devices." more
This week, on a cruise ship navigating Russia's Neva river, around 250 domain registrars and resellers are gathered for the RU-CENTER annual domain conference. RU-CENTER is the largest Russian registrar in a market that is dominated by three companies. RU-CENTER and competitor Reg.Ru both manage around 28% of domains registered in the country's national suffix... RU-CENTER is also a figurehead for Russia's drive to make Internet use more palatable for those who are not natural ASCII writers. more
Many nations, particularly from the developing world, look to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) for advice on telecommunications issues and, increasingly, Internet governance issues. The ITU's Fifth World Telecommunication / ICT Policy Forum (WTPF-13), 14-16 May 2013, Geneva, Switzerland, will be the first WTPF to focus exclusively on Internet issues. more
In the previous installments we looked at software changes in mail servers, and in the software that lets user mail programs pick up mail. What has to change in the user mail programs? ... The first and most obvious is that users have to be able to enter the addresses. more
In the previous instalment we looked at the software changes needed for mail servers to handle internationalized mail, generally abbreviated as EAI. When a message arrives, whether ASCII or EAI, mail servers generally drop it into a mailbox and let the user pick it up. The usual ways for mail programs to pick up mail are POP3 and IMAP4. more