Rachel Maddow, host of all that is worth watching on television, very kindly invited me back to The Rachel Maddow Show tonight for a "Moment of Geek" on the big ICANN news today: starting soon, domain name extensions will be available in non-Latin character sets. Chinese, Greek, Arabic, or any one of the more than 20 official languages in India. In other words, the alphabet you're reading this blog post in will no longer be the default for web addresses.
When Ms. Maddow's team invited me in earlier today, the first thing I did was phone Hong Kong-based journalist and global 'net culture researcher Rebecca MacKinnon (Twitter: @rmack), who was in Seoul attending the big ICANN meeting. She has written extensively on this topic, and helped me parse the news.
First up for the "non-Latin" extensions? Country-specific domain names (.cn for China, for instance). Later on, everything else (.com and the like). Don't expect to see "dot china" in Chinese characters right away, explained Rebecca: starting November 16, registrars can begin to apply, but it'll be a while before the domains show up in the wild.
Some US tech reporters covering the news ran with but what about meeee! headlines. "This is a bad day for the English language," wrote one. Well, someone call the whaambulance — it's an awesome day if you read in Farsi or Hebrew. It's not about our language, it's about the languages spoken by the next billion people to come online, and most of them don't speak English or write in a language based on our Latin character set.
As MacKinnon reminded me from Seoul, today's announcement follows earlier news that ICANN, formed ten years ago under the auspices of the US Dept. of Commerce, will no longer answer directly to the US, but to a sort of congregation of world governments.
Many groups around the world from non-governmental organizations and civil society still have concerns about ensuring their voices are heard.
"What if a human rights group in Canada wants to register a domain name in Chinese or Arabic, in the native-alphabet country extensions for China or Saudi Arabia," she said, "Can the countries involved deny that request? Those are the sort of challenges to free speech that lie ahead."
More online:
- Web Addresses Now Can Be All Greek to You, ICANN Rules (Wired)
- Latin to lose its domain over Internet addresses (Reuters)
- At last, the web goes truly worldwide (Independent)
- Making 'net global (Arab News)
- A more connected and equal world (Independent)
