BRAZIL — Regardless of how impassioned some English language speakers are about the sanctity of their language and its importance as an international method for business communication, there are some who simply do not agree and therefore stubbornly prefer their own language – even online. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has just promised to make the internet a bit more comprehensible for those using non-English scripts. The issues of local-language scripting and country-coded top level domains were able to rise above the feared debate about U.S. control of internet during this week’s Internet Governance Forum in Rio de Janeiro, with ICANN vowing swift action on both fronts.
With assistance from the ICANN policy development group Country Code Names Supporting Organization, the DNS regulatory agency will promptly begin work to distribute ccTLDs to nations that don’t use Latin characters.
ccNSO chair, Chris Disspain issued a statement explaining that “A lot of hard work has been done on IDNs (internationalized domain names) and there is a technical evaluation of their impact… going on as we speak.”
According to Disspain, “The next step is to develop the policies that will see the creation of new top-level domains in characters from the languages of the world.”
The decision to approve the establishment of an IDN working group was made earlier this month in Los Angeles with the goal of swift deployment first in what Disspain calls the “areas of highest need.”
Ultimately, the consumer will determine how the fast-track process will work since, as Disspain points out, it “will really be driven by those who want to take part and get their name in their language on their internet in their country.”
