Multilinguism

Why ICANN TLD Policy Imposes Severe Constraint on Development of Internationalized Domain Names

In 2008, ICANN made it known to the community that it is finally ready to discuss Internationalized Domain Names regarding Top-Level Domains (TLDs) after several years of working groups, technical trials, studies and considerations. It was highly anticipated by the Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) community. It was also with great disappointment when the New gTLD Application Guidebook, published on 24th Oct 2008, included the following paragraph... more

ICANN Does Something Technical!

I've often said that ICANN regulates the business of buying and selling of domain names and that ICANN's claim that it coordinates technical matters to preserve the stability of DNS is a fantasy. Well I am proven wrong. ICANN has done something technical. ICANN has issued Guidelines for the Implementation of Internationalized Domain Names, Draft Version 2 [PDF] (pending approval by the ICANN board.) It's only four pages long, but those few pages contain a lot of significant material. more

Developing Internet Standards: How Can the Engineering Community and the Users Meet?

There is currently a discussion going on between Milton Mueller and Patrik Fältström over the deployment of DNSSEC on the root servers. I think the discussion exemplifies the difficult relation between those who develop standards and those who use them. On the one hand, Milton points out that the way the signing of the root zone will be done will have a great influence on the subjective trust people and nation states will have towards the system. On the other hand, Patrik states that "DNSSEC is just digital signatures on records in this database". Both are right, of course, but they do not speak the same language... more

Is ICANN Running a Racket?

On March 13, 2019, I published an article on CircleID, Portrait of a Single-Character Domain Name, that explored the proposed release and auction of o.com, a single-character .com domain name that was registered in 1993 and assigned to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) by Dr. Jon Postel. Although the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has since raised serious objections... more

When Will The Internet Be Divided Among Nations?

The desired goal of most of the other countries other than US is to end up with their own local language suffixes, own local language domain names, basically their own Internet, with its own domain registration policies -- in a nutshell, a very big and a very complex global mess, indeed. This fight over ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is all about a golden key, as without it, the Internet is completely useless. ...It's also ICANN, the organization that from the start has made some very stringent and often very weird policies about such issues as the golden keys. Now its global authority is being challenged, and such fights could divide the power of this controlling body, and any adverse outcome will simply split the Internet.  more

.???? Brings the Promise of a New Digital India

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

Vint Cerf: 2009 a Turning Point for the Internet

Patrick Neighly reports on CommsDay about the Pacific Telecommunications Council 2009 Conference held last week where Vint Cerf was a keynote speaker. From the report: "Historians will view 2009 as a turning point in Internet history, according to Google internet evangelist Vint Cerf. Speaking to PTC'09 attendees, the legendary figure warned the industry to brace for 'significant change' and said Asia was poised to forever change the look and experience of the online landscape. The region boasts 578.5 million surfers with nearly 85% of its population still to come. That influx is likely to combine with the launch of non-Latin-character addresses to reshape the Web into a very different beast." more

ICANN’s Proposed Changes to IDN Registration

A month ago, ICANN announced that it had a large set of proposed changes to its "Guidelines for the Implementation of Internationalized Domain Names". The original guidelines are fairly confusing and not widely deployed by the ccTLDs, so one would think that the proposed revisions would be clearer and more useful. No such luck. Instead of describing what the problems with the old guidelines were, the committee that put together the new proposal simply added a whole bunch more rules. more

China Favouring Digits Over Letters When It Comes to Internet Addresses

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

First World Domain Day Conference Concludes in India

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

The Next Internet Revolution Will Not Be in English

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

The Inextricable Issue of Internationalized Domain Names

ICANN has embarked on the IDN boat at the same time it wants to introduce DNSSEC and new gTLDs. This promises lots of fun. Or grey hair, depending how you look at it. First is the issue of country code IDNs. The ISO-3166 table, based on two letter codes, is a western convention. Some cultures do not use abbreviations or acronyms. Some do not use a character-based alphabet, but a syllabic one. Hence, the next logical step would be to represent the full country name in local script, rather than a transliteration of the ISO string... Imagine the case of India, where there are 1.652 languages, of which 24 are spoken by more than one million people... more

Thought Leaders Create New Trends & Solutions, Followers Just Follow - Which Are You?

Last week I asked on a post elsewhere, why we, at the MLi Group, chose to consider speakers, panelists, supporters and sponsors at our Global Summit Series (GSS) as "Thought Leaders" and "Trend Setters? Many wrote me directly offering their answers and then it dawned on me that my answer may (or may not) get appreciated by many at the ICANN community. So here is why we do. more

How Rise in Nationalism and Industry’s Lack of Foresight Could Mean a Fragmented and Isolated Web

I have been thinking a lot lately on the topic of the free flow of information on the internet -- what kinds of tools are available now and in the future for governments (especially repressive ones) to control content, isolate their people and keep any contrary viewpoints censored. I had an interesting conversation with a Practice Lead from IFTF.org. The Institute for the Future (IFTF) is a California based independent, nonprofit research group with 40 years of experience in identifying emerging trends that will transform global society... Turns out they are quite concerned about the fragmentation and control of the Internet as well. But will it be an inevitability? more

Regime Change on the Internet: Conference Notes

"Regime Change on the Internet? Internet Governance after WGIG" was the first public event held in the United States on July 28, 2005 to review the UN Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) report. Here are my notes from the event: "Markus Kummer, Executive Coordinator, UN Working Group on Internet Governance, reminded the audience that the mandate of the WGIG was specifically articulated by the first part of the WSIS - "To investigate and make proposals for action as appropriate". It was not for sweeping regime change as the conference title would suggest." more