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2009-10-27 11:28:02
By KELLY OLSEN, AP Business Writer Kelly Olsen, Ap Business Writer Mon Oct
26, 5:58 am ET
SEOUL, South Korea The Internet is set to undergo one of the biggest changes
in its four-decade history with the expected approval this week of
international domain names or addresses that can be written in languages
other than English, an official said Monday.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN the
non-profit group that oversees domain names is holding a meeting this week in
Seoul. Domain names are the monikers behind every Web site, e-mail address and
Twitter post, such as ".com" and other suffixes.
One of the key issues to be taken up by ICANN's board at this week's gathering
is whether to allow for the first time entire Internet addresses to be in
scripts that are not based on Latin letters. That could potentially open up the
Web to more people around the world as addresses could be in characters as
diverse as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic in which
Russian is written.
"This is the biggest change technically to the Internet since it was invented
40 years ago," Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board, told
reporters, calling it a "fantastically complicated technical feature." He said
he expects the board to grant approval on Friday, the conference's final day.
The Internet's roots are traced to experiments at a U.S. university in 1969 but
it wasn't until the early 1990s that its use began expanding beyond academia
and research institutions to the public.
Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's new president and CEO, said that if the change is
approved, ICANN would begin accepting applications for non-English domain names
and that the first entries into the system would likely come sometime in mid
2010.
Enabling the change, Thrush said, is the creation of a translation system that
allows multiple scripts to be converted to the right address.
"We're confident that it works because we've been testing it now for a couple
of years," he said. "And so we're really ready to start rolling it out."
Of the 1.6 billion Internet users worldwide, Beckstrom a former chief of U.S.
cybersecurity said that more than half use languages that have scripts based
on alphabets other than Latin.
"So this change is very much necessary for not only half the world's Internet
users today, but more than half of probably the future users as the use of the
Internet continues to spread," he said.
Beckstrom, in earlier remarks to conference participants, recalled that many
people had said just three to five years ago that using non-Latin scripts for
domain names would be impossible to achieve.
"But you the community and the policy groups and staff and board have worked
through them, which is absolutely incredible," he said.
ICANN is headquartered in the United States in Marina del Rey, California.