Interwebz goes truly international!

[Peikko 1,575]

The world body controlling internet addresses agreed on Friday to allow countries to mark their territory not only with their own abbreviations, such as .uk or .fr, but with their own alphabets as well.

Icann’s willingness to add top-level country codes in Chinese, Korean, Cyrillic and Arabic characters ends a monopoly by Latin letters that has endured since the web’s beginning and limited its appeal. About half the internet’s users do not speak languages based on the Latin alphabet. They could still travel to much of the web by clicking on links compiled by search engines and other sites, but they have been far less likely to get to the site they had in mind when first logging on.

After national internet bodies apply and meet technical tests, speakers of the additional languages will be able to navigate directly to site addresses by typing them into the browser. That helps solidify the web’s claim to be truly worldwide, and it has more subtle political implications as well.

China has the world’s greatest share of the estimated 1.6bn internet users, with about 340m of its own. But the government monitors what leading search engines link to and many sites practise self-censorship. That has meant that web pages controlled by dissidents have been rendered essentially invisible to much of the population.

Now those uncomfortable with the Latin alphabet will be able to steer themselves to the right place without relying on referral links.

“This is a huge and positive change in internet history,” said Wang Peng, senior project manager at HiChina, the country’s leading internet service provider. “This will bring access for more people to get to know the internet without even a basic knowledge of English letters.”

The end of Latin rule will help smaller companies as well as political minorities, its supporters said. Baidu, China’s leading search engine, lists search results mainly through commercial bidding for keywords. This means that direct navigation by users is more important for sites with small marketing budgets.

The decision to expand the languages of address endings represented what Icann’s chairman called the greatest technical change since the web’s inception. It received final approval at this week’s Seoul meeting by the non-profit group, known formally as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and ­Numbers.

The impact will vary by location, with more remote countries seeing the biggest expansion. Rod Beckstrom, Icann’s president, called the step “a historic move toward the internationalisation of the internet ... We just made the internet much more accessible to millions of people in regions such as Asia, the Middle East and Russia.”

Link