CIRA has launched a new round of consultations on its amended plans to introduce Internationalized Domain Names. The new process will signficantly restrict the number of new domains as the dot-ca administrative agency is now proposing that the holder of a particular domain name would have the exclusive right to […]
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Multilingual Domain Name Delay a Barrier to Net Diversity
My weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) focuses on the delays associated with establishing multilingual domain names (often referred to as internationalized domain names). Since their inception, domain names have been largely confined to ASCII text, based on a Roman character set used in the English language. While this works well for people familiar with those characters, thousands of other language characters – from French accents to the Greek alphabet to Japanese Kanji – are not represented. This creates a significant access barrier for non-English speakers, who are forced to use the Roman characters for most aspects of their Internet addressing.
Multilingual Domain Name Delay A Barrier to Net Diversity
Appeared in the Toronto Star on June 4, 2007 as It's Time to Support a Multilingual Web Imagine if each time a Canadian Internet user entered an email or website address, they would be required to include a Chinese or Cyrillic character. For millions of non-English speakers around the world, […]
Chinese Domains Alter Net Governance Landscape
My weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, BBC version, homepage version) looks back at last week’s announcement of changes to the Chinese domain name system. While Chinese officials have clarified that this does not involve an alternate root, I argue that the developments are significant since they reinforce the mounting frustration with ICANN’s failure to develop multilingual domain names. Moreover, China’s ability to implement its own IDN system without ICANN support is likely to serve as a model for many other countries around the world.
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