Internet’s biggest change in 40 years
Jinfo Blog

26th May 2010

By Anne Jordan

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This is how Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of ICANN, described the introduction of non-Latin characters for country code top-level domains, the first of which became available earlier this month for Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The Russian Federation went live yesterday and today I have been searching Cyrillic TLDs. Last October ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, announced a Fast Track Process enabling countries and territories to submit requests to ICANN for IDN country code top-level domains (ccTLDs), representing their respective country or territory names in scripts other than Latin. So far, ICANN has received 21 requests for IDN ccTLDs representing 11 languages. 13 requests have successfully passed through the second stage of the process, three of which have been made available, and the remainder passing through the final stage of the process. With the launch of top-level domains for Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Arabic has become the first non-Latin script to be used as an IDN ccTLD. ICANN’s press release (http://digbig.com/5bbqpr) states that Arabic is among the most highly used languages on the Internet today. Users in the region will now have the ability to use their primary language for the entire domain name, making the internet more accessible and more global. A BBC article pointed out that some countries, such as China and Thailand, had already introduced workarounds that allow computer users to enter web addresses in their own language, but that these were not internationally approved and do not necessarily work on all computers (http://digbig.com/5bbqps). Indeed ICANN has warned that the new non-Latin domain names would not necessarily work on all PCs immediately, depending on which language fonts are installed. So what does this mean for the information professional? I think that remains to be seen. Making the internet more accessible for speakers of languages with non-Latin scripts, will presumably lead to more content generation as users can use their own language, and their own keyboard. Major news will be covered in the main English language press, or available through the translation services and tools of aggregators, but original language sources can often be key to uncovering vital local information. As the new ccTLDs come online, it will be interesting to see how the aggregators and media monitoring services incorporate these sources.

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