What if you had to learn a whole new language, in an entirely different alphabet, to use the internet? Those hurdles would make much of what we take for granted inaccessible. It's a work in progress and it's taken 11 years.
"Instead of having to use the Latin domain.ru, Russian organisations will now be able to use the Cyrillic equivalent.
ICANN approved the gradual introduction of internationalised domain names last year. Nations can now apply for country-level domain names in other scripts, such as Arabic or Chinese, but eventually this will be expanded to all internet address names.
So far, as well Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have won ICANN approval to use their national language scripts on the top-level domain, or last part of the address after the dot.
"It's a very big move. The internet's been around roughly for four decades and this is the first time that domain names are opening up to people's native tongues and scripts," Beckstrom said.
He said ICANN had received about 21 requests so far for international domain names (IDNs) from countries.
Beckstrom said it had taken 11 years of technical work to find a way to bring in other languages.
"When the internet was invented and when the standards were initially developed they wanted to have it available for all scripts but there wasn't a standard back then so they used ASCII or Latinate characters as a standard," he said.
"The internet's been accessible to a lot of young people who are comfortable learning new languages or other characters but there are many people who aren't that comfortable working in other languages and character sets," said Beckstrom.ASCII is an encoding scheme that translates letters of the Latin alphabet, numbers and other symbols into the 1s and 0s that computers can understand."We see it really opening up to all of the world and actually the internet becoming more truly global."
Reported by Reuters on stuff.co.nz
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