THE Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) recently announced the conclusion of its 27th International Public Meeting in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The Internet's key oversight agency sought to identify policy disputes that might arise from the introduction of addresses that end in non-Latin scripts. It marks one more step toward making the Internet truly global, Associated Press has reported.
ICANN announced it has signed an agreement with DotAsia Organization to create the ".asia" domain name. It will be used in China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and other countries in the Asia-Pacific region.
ICANN says the addition of ".asia" will bring the number of Internet suffixes up to 266. Similar to the creation of ".eu" for the European Union, the new name would be an addition to domains already available for individual countries, like ".cn" for China and ".jp" for Japan.
A domain name is a unique address that allows people to access a website, for example, teachingenglish.org.uk.
At present website domain names have been limited to the 26 characters of the English alphabet, the 10 numerals and the hyphen. This effectively alienates countries using Arabic, Chinese and other foreign letters from registering Internet addresses in their native tongue.
Operators of some domain name suffixes, such as ".com" and Thailand's ".th," already have adopted technical tricks to understand other scripts. However, the suffixes remain in English. ICANN so far has barred addresses entirely in non-Latin scripts. If non-English letters were allowed, this number of characters that can be used in domain names would rise to 50,000 or more.
In anticipation of non-English suffixes, the ICANN board asked representatives from governments and operators of country-code domains such as ".fr" for France to come up with a list of policy questions. That could include who should decide what countries get what suffixes and how to make sure a domain in one language isn't offensive in another, said Vint Cerf, ICANN's chairman.
Engineers have been considering technical issues surrounding such names. One concern is that characters in two scripts sometimes look alike. It will raise the possibility that criminals might sub one for the other as part of scams.
