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Since it was created, the Internet has been dominated by the English language. But a new experiment launching Monday threatens to disrupt the status quo online and could change the way French-speaking and Native Canadians surf the Web.
Today, the U.S. organization in charge of overseeing and regulating domain names online, is to launch 11 test sites in languages that don't use the Roman alphabet – the 26 letters used in English and most other European languages.
“This will be one of the biggest changes to the Internet since it was created,” said Paul Twomey, president and chief executive officer of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
Until now, addresses on the World Wide Web used Roman alphabet-based suffixes – .com, .org or .net – even if the rest of the domain name appeared in a language such as Japanese, Russian or Arabic. Millions of Internet users around the world who don't use the Roman-based alphabet are still forced to use foreign characters they don't understand to get to where they're going on the Web.
Experts say French-speaking and Native Canadians may now be able to more effectively pressure the Canadian Internet Registry Agency to make changes to the Canadian domain name system.
Because domain names can only contain characters from the English language, many characters used in other languages – such as the accented E's in French – cannot be used in the suffix of web addresses.
The CIRA has talked about creating a multilingual domain name system in Canada, but has been slow to push forward on the issue, University of Ottawa Internet law professor Michael Geist said.
“I think it's a positive step,” he said. “It's one that is long overdue and one that highlights the fact that Canada has not made the same kind of progress that it should on the same issue domestically. Surely in a bilingual country our domain names ought to have full functionality in both languages.”
The CIRA plans to support IDN through the use of Latin script with the addition of accented French letters, spokesman David Hicks said in an e-mail to The Globe and Mail.
“There are currently no plans to support additional scripts at this time,” he said.
“We could add additional script support, e.g. Aboriginal languages, at a later date if there is sufficient demand.”
For Vadim Sloutsky, the changes mean he will have to pay more to register multiple domain names in multiple scripts for his Russian-language Toronto information website, torontovka.com.
“If I don't do it, and somebody else does it, people will be misguided,” he said.
“It forces me as a business owner to go out and book that domain and pay that additional money for that domain name.”
Otherwise someone could purchase torontovka.com in Russian Cyrillic letters and set up a competing site, he said.
Since 2003, the part of the domain name preceding the suffix – everything before the .com or .ca, also known as the secondary-level domain name – could appear in a script that did not use the Roman alphabet.
Today ICANN will be installing links on its website to test top-level domain sites in 11 different non-Roman languages – Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil – using the native script in both the body and suffix of the web addresses.
The pages will allow Internet users to establish subpages, leave comments and test how well the IDNs link to their pages, according to a statement from ICANN. The organization expects to begin offering working addresses that use non-Roman suffixes toward the end of 2008.
Internet users outside North America and other Western nations have been demanding this change for years. Two years ago at a UN summit, the U.S. government refused to give up its unilateral oversight of the Internet despite fervent opposition from other nations. ICANN had pledged to pursue international domain names as far back as 2000, but experts say it was never seen as a top priority for the privately held, non-profit organization which reports to the U.S. Department of Commerce.
