A Script for Every Surfer
Responding to criticism from the non-English- speaking world, the U.S. firm that
oversees the Internet will test domains in foreign characters.
By Catherine Rampell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 11, 2007; D01
Is the World Wide Web truly worldwide? Depends on whom you ask.
Since the Internet came into widespread use, those among the 70 percent of
the world that doesn't speak English have argued that the Web is inaccessible.
So next week the nonprofit group contracted by the U.S. government to run the
Internet will begin testing domain names in other alphabets.
On Monday, the
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will conduct a
test to see whether domains written entirely in foreign scripts can work without
crashing the Net. For several years, the company has allowed domains that are
half in foreign characters, such as [Chinese text].com or [Arabic text].org. For
the test, domain names will look like [Korean text].[Korean text].
The long road to this stage, which comes nearly a decade after the technology
for creating multilingual domains was invented, has left many in the
non-English-speaking world impatient and angry. Questions of political and
linguistic sovereignty, alongside accusations of American "digital colonialism,"
have motivated some countries to create their own Internets, effectively
mounting a challenge to the World Wide Web.
Experts say the difficulties of typing in a foreign script have probably held
back development of online economies abroad.
"Think of what it would be like if every time you typed out an e-mail address
or visited a Web site you had to use Chinese characters or Sanskrit," said
Michael Geist, who teaches Internet and e-commerce law at the University of
Ottawa. "That's exactly like what people in other countries have to do."
Even the hybrid script names that ICANN allows haven't made things much
easier. With this model, speakers of Hebrew, Arabic and any other language
written from right to left must type half of the URL in one direction and the
other half -- the .com, .net or .org postscript -- the opposite way.
Some advocates of internationalizing the Internet have accused ICANN of
ignoring the needs of the developing world.
"Almost 10 years ago we went to the CEO of ICANN with the technology to make
[multilingual domains] work," said S. Subbiah, co-inventor of the first
multilingual domain technology, who estimates that 2 million of the 138 million
domains registered worldwide contain non-English characters. "The response was
basically, 'I'm too busy. Go learn English.' "
"There's . . . a little anti-American rock-throwing in that description,"
said Mike Roberts, the first president and chief executive of ICANN. "The
engineers thought that trying to do the non-Roman alphabet thing with all this
growth would destabilize the Internet and cause crashes."
The politically sensitive business of standardizing languages has also held
up the process.
Countries with slightly different versions of the same script have fought
over spelling. Debates have also raged over which corporate, sovereign and
ethnic interests should control which domains.
VeriSign, for example, is the U.S. registry that manages all the domains
that end in .com, which represent half of all the domains in the world. Should
it also be given control over multilingual domains that end in some translated
version of .com? Or should countries have the right to control all domains in
their own national languages? What about languages that cross borders, such as
Arabic?
Even the technical tests have caused political flare-ups.
Next week's experiments use the domain name "example.test" translated into 11
languages. A previous model, however, used "hippopotamus" instead of "test."
These plans went awry when an Israeli registrar realized the Hebrew word ICANN
thought meant "hippopotamus" was an expletive and threatened to involve the
Israeli government.
Some countries have taken matters into their own hands.
At least a dozen countries, including
China and
Saudi Arabia, have created their own domains in different alphabets and
their own Internets to support these domains. A Russian newspaper article last
July reported that President
Vladimir Putin was commissioning the creation of a Cyrillic Internet. Users
of
Russia's Internet, like current users of China's and Saudi Arabia's, could
surf the Web without going through U.S.-controlled ICANN servers.
"We have been told so many times it will be next year and next year and next
year that ICANN will make" multilingual domains work, said Alexei Sozonov, chief
executive of Regtime, a Russian domain registrar. "So countries now have their
own deployments."
Without coordination, some experts say, these new networks will increasingly
fragment and destabilize the Internet.
"The longer it takes for ICANN to introduce these domain names, the greater
the amount of chaos there'll be," said Ram Mohan, chief technology officer at
Afilias and the chair of ICANN's working group on multilingual domains and
Internet stability.
Others say patching these countries' Internets together into a "federation"
of Internets could preserve global interconnectivity.
"I don't think the sky is falling," said Milton L. Mueller, professor of
information studies at
Syracuse and a partner at the Internet Governance Project, a global Internet
policy think tank. "There are strong economic incentives to maintain
compatibility."
These economic incentives, however, may be outweighed by political interests.
Independent Internets could, for example, give countries greater censorship
power.
"If the Chinese can say you can't post the word 'democracy' in the title of a
blog entry, then good luck registering 'democracy.com' in Chinese," said John
Palfrey, executive director of
Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
Still, one country's censorship could be another's peacekeeping.
"There should be some restrictions on domain names that are culturally
sensitive," said Yoav Keren, chief executive of Israeli domain registrar Domain
The Net, which does not allow registrations of Nazism sites.
"Having a domain that insults a whole community for all eternity is not
something you want," he said. "Look what happened with the Danish cartoons that
insulted Muslims."
Security experts say coordination of multilingual domains is also important
to protect consumers. The similarity of many language scripts makes Web users
vulnerable to fraud. Eric Johanson, a security engineer, demonstrated this
threat in 2005 with the creation of a paypal.com look-alike site where the first
Latin letter 'a' was replaced with a Cyrillic letter 'a.' The two URLs look
identical.
To prevent similar spoofing attacks, China, Korea and
Japan recently developed standards for their overlapping scripts. Today, if
you register a domain in Japanese kanji, for example, a similar version of the
domain in Chinese characters is usually given, too.
"The Chinese and the Japanese were screaming and throwing shoes at each other
at their first meeting," Subbiah said. "Then, when they got it right, they
became the role model for how this should work."
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