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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, this is precisely what they experience when they use the Internet as the domain name system is unable to fully accommodate their local language.

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.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the agency responsible for administering the domain name system, has long pledged to remedy this issue by creating “internationalized domain names” (more appropriately described as multilingual domain names).  Indeed, nearly seven years ago the ICANN board passed a resolution recognizing "that it is important that the Internet evolve to be more accessible to those who do not use the ASCII character set."

Notwithstanding its stated commitment to multilingual domains, the issue has languished, a victim of indifference and even occasional hostility from ICANN leadership.  Last year, after a group of developing countries emphasized the need for faster progress on the issue, ICANN President and CEO Paul Twomey warned that "if we get this wrong we could very easily and permanently break the Internet."

Multilingual domains have also been stymied by opposition from the trademark community, a powerful lobby group within the ICANN system which fears that the introduction of new language characters will lead to market confusion and a proliferation of cybersquatting disputes.

ICANN has repeatedly struck committees, held workshops, and introduced guidelines, yet there has been little to show for the efforts. Governments have become increasingly impatient with the lack of progress.  At the 2005 World Summit on the Information Society, they specifically underlined the need to "advance the process for the introduction of multilingualism in a number of areas including domain names, e-mail addresses and keyword look-up" and to "implement programmes that allow for the presence of multilingual domain names and content on the Internet…to ensure the participation of all in the emerging new society."

While the international Internet community has struggled with the multilingual domain name issue, many countries have prioritized the implementation of local languages within their country-code domain names.  In fact, the strongest indictment of international inaction comes from the experiences elsewhere – China, Korea, Germany, Sweden, Greece, and Israel are among the dozens of countries that have successfully implemented multilingual domain names within their local domain name system so that Internet users can function in their local language when using country-code domains such as dot-cn (China) or dot-de (Germany) even if the international system is still off-limits.

Canada has disappointingly lagged on this issue.  The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), which manages the dot-ca domain, should pass one million domain name registrations by early 2008, yet implementation of French language characters is only likely to take place in the next few years.

CIRA has faced community pressure to address the issue. Multilingual domains were raised as a concern at a 2003 CIRA public forum in Halifax and again at a 2004 CIRA public forum in Calgary.  At each event, CIRA indicated that the issue was a priority and promised action by 2006.  

By August 2006, the Government of Quebec decided that it had waited long enough.  In a letter to the CIRA Board (I was a member of the board at the time), it delivered an official request for multilingual domains to allow for the use of French language characters.

Most of the world – including thousands of Canadians – are literally locked out of the domain name system by reason of limitations in language. With an ICANN meeting set for later this month in Puerto Rico and the CIRA annual meeting scheduled for early September, the time has come to prioritize linguistic diversity on the Internet by giving multilingual domains the attention they deserve.

Michael Geist holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law.  He can reached at mgeist@uottawa.ca or online at www.michaelgeist.ca.

4 Comments

  1. Jonathan Rawle says:

    I’m always surprised when it’s claimed Latin-alphabet addresses are a barrier to Chinese web users. How do you suppose they enter Chinese characters? Not with 4000+ keys on their keyboard! The pinyin system of Romanisation has always been used for computer input, and the alphabet is taught in schools before they start learning Chinese characters. Even if the URL of the most popular Chinese search engine was 百度.com, one would still type baidu.com to enter it!

  2. Roberto Ehrlich says:

    In continuation to what Jonathan wrote. I live in Israel where not many people are familiar with English writing, but nevertheless people use the Internet as their day-to-day activity. How they do that? Either they have a search engine as home-page (e.g Google, Tapuz, Walla,…) or they can even what they are looking for in Hebrew and the major ISP’s have a Hebrew-to-URL translation server, meaning that if you are looking for, lets say, some office, just write the name of the office on the address bar and the site comes up as magic. Unfortunately I think that this trick only works on Firefox (I don’t use M$IE, so I cannot tell). On the other hand, if you by mistake type the whole URL but wrote it in Hebrew there is a site ([ link ]) with a small window saying that you typed blah-blah in Hebrew but was really looking for foo.com site there is the correct link. So I don’t see why other non Latin-character languages cannot use such engines.

  3. Талл&# says:

    Russian and Thai are two languages that have non-roman keyboards. Fortunately the Latin characters are printed on most Thai keyboards (not sure about Russian), but there’s no reason why Cyrillic-reading and Thai people language should be forced to switch into Latin?

    As Roberto points out, however, companies can take stop gap measures. For example, [ link ] should write their name in Cyrillic in the page TITLE, so that the site will appear if people search for the company in Cyrillic using a search engine.

  4. Honorable
    Using one text system for all internet traffic has many huge advantages in terms of simplicity and universailty, and the roman (ASCII) alphabet is the simplest already-standard option. This proposal for a multilingual DNBS is really not a good or helpful thing.