The Government of India and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) organized a two-day event on Universal Acceptance Day (UAD) on the 27th and 28th of March to promote multilingual Internet and digital inclusion in India. The event highlighted the necessity of providing emails and websites in native languages to enable access to the Internet and bridge the digital divide across the nation. more
A study conducted by the Oxford Information Labs in collaboration with Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries (CENTR), finds that the role of country and regional TLDs is imperative in supporting diversity in global online linguistic. more
Internet root servers will soon allow domain name registrations in nine Indian scripts, according to Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG). more
Internet penetration in the Middle East tripled in the past eight years, from 20 per cent in 2009 to 60 per cent this year as a result of the introduction of Arabic domain names. 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
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
John Yunker reporting in Global by Design: "Google has gone live with one if its many Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs): ???. I want to emphasize here that this is a top-level IDN - that is, the equivalent of a .com or .org. This TLD, according to Google, stands for 'everyone.' So you could in effect register 'someword.everyone,' which sounds a bit odd to me but I'm not Japanese. And, frankly, the Japanese have not been blessed with much in the way of IDN options up to this point." 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
At the press conference held in London on June 13, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) officially announced a list of 1930 applications for the new generic top level domain (gTLD). During the 40 years since the launch of the Internet, there are only 22 gTLDs such as .com. The 1930 applications represent a historical change to the Internet; For the first time, Chinese gTLDs will become available and there are 67 unique applications for Chinese gTLDs. more
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced today its approval of non-Latin string evaluation of Iran. This approval will allow the availability of Iran's top-level domain in its own native language, Persian, also known as Farsi (that is, the domain name .IRAN, in non-Latin characters). According to ICANN, there are currently 33 requests for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) country code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs) representing 22 languages out of which 18 countries/territories have so far been approved. Other countries that have also successfully passed this string evaluation by ICANN include: India, Republic of Korea, Syrian Arab Republic and Singapore. more
ICANN's Board of Directors on Friday approved a set of Chinese language internationalized domain names which will allow millions of Chinese language users to access the internet using their native script. The new Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) country code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs) and the associated organizations approved by the ICANN board include three different organizations: CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center), HKIRC (Hong Kong Internet Registration Corporation Limited), and TWNIC (Taiwan Network Information Center). more
The first Internet domains using the Cyrillic script were launched on May 13 after Russia was officially assigned the .?? (.rf, for "Russian Federation") domain by the global Internet governing body. Representatives of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) handed Russia its Cyrillic domain administration certificate at an Internet forum that kicked off in Moscow. more
Announced in a blog post today, ICANN's Manager of Root Zone Services, Kim Davies, reports: "Today the first three production non-Latin top-level domains were placed in the DNS root zone. ... The three new top-level domains are ????????. (“Al-Saudiah”), ??????. ( “Emarat”) and ???. (“Misr”). All three are Arabic script domains, and will enable domain names written fully right-to-left. Expect more as we continue to process other applications using the “fast track” methodology." more
CNN Live interviews ICANN Senior Director of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) on issues related to new IDN developments. The interview includes overview of extending top-level domains to enable TLDs such as .com, .cn (for China), and .gr (for Greece) available in their native languages and scripts. more
ICANN has given Jordan preliminary approval for its IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) ccTLD. "At this time ICANN has received a total of 21 requests for IDN ccTLD(s) through the String Evaluation process, representing 11 languages. A total of 13 requests have successfully passed through the String Evaluation and are hence ready for the requesting country or territory to initiate the application for String Delegation." more
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