[IP] Multilingual name servers, perhaps a fateful next step
Begin forwarded message:
From: David Allen <David_Allen_AB63@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: May 16, 2006 8:09:15 PM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Multilingual name servers, perhaps a fateful next step
Dave,
Last week in Geneva there was followup to China's earlier story, that
for a couple years already it has been operating with fully
multilingual name resolution. At an ITU UNESCO meeting on the subject,
http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/worksem/multilingual/index.html
a number of other countries discussed their own ML.ML rollouts, with
a wider selection of other language scripts. The organization MINC
http://www.minc.org
began the process of coordinating among them. In the meeting there
was a gathering momentum around this.
Bellow is one of the resulting news reports. (Despite implications
of 'newness' in the second last para, China has been operating for
awhile in fact - in March the important event was an awakening to the
reality by the rest of the world.)
For IP if useful.
David
David Allen
Co-Principal
Collab CPR
(World Collaboration for Communications Policy Research)
______
Challenge to US control of website names
By Frances Williams in Geneva
Published: May 12 2006 18:42 | Last updated: May 12 2006 18:42
Fed up with the lack of an international system for internet
addresses using non-western scripts, many countries are joining China
in creating their own.
These moves are seen as a direct challenge to the authority of the US-
based body that runs the international domain name system and a
potential threat to the universality of the worldwide web.
A United Nations-sponsored meeting on the multilingual internet this
week called for faster progress in introducing so-called
internationalised domain names (IDNs), which are seen as an essential
tool in spreading internet use and combating the digital divide
between rich and poor nations.
Icann (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers),
which operates the global internet address system under the authority
of the US commerce department, has been working for several years on
IDNs and says it will be ready to start technical tests of an
international naming system later this year.
But many countries have not bothered to wait and, like China, have
found their own technical solutions. According to Subramanian
Subbiah, co-founder of i-DNS.net, a Singapore company that sells
internet domain names based on non-Roman characters, 2m such names
have been registered since 1999 in nearly 40 countries.
Although 90 per cent of these names are in Chinese, Japanese and
Korean - which share a common character set - other countries using
IDNs include India, Thailand, Russia, Greece, Brazil, Israel, Iran
and a number of Arab states.
Icann has been wrestling with the technical problems of ensuring that
a web address typed in any language directs users to the same site.
But Robert Shaw, internet adviser to the Geneva-based International
Telecommunication Union, says countries are putting a higher priority
on accessibility in their own language than on the "pure" Icann
notion of a seamless global internet.
So far, the development of IDNs outside Icann has not compromised
global interconnectivity because they relate to country domains,
like .cn (China) or jp (Japan), where addresses are allocated at a
national level based on numbers assigned by Icann.
But in March this year China announced that it was creating Chinese
language versions not only of cn but also of "top level" domains such
as .com and .net that are ostensibly the preserve of Icann. Arab
countries, Israel and Iran also have plans for IDN versions of top-
level domains.
This has increased pressure on Icann to devolve these addressing
decisions to regional or local bodies familiar with the language, Mr
Shaw said.
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/c51879de-e1d9-11da-bf4c-0000779e2340,s01=1.html
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