By Dave Adamson in Reader
Posted in Uncategorized on October 30, 2009 at 9:28 am
Just read, via Twitter, on The Guardian website that ICann, the Internet regulator, have approved the use of Internationalised Domain Names, allowing near complete web addresses in languages other than English.
The article, http://bit.ly/2ANqfL, makes interesting reading; suggesting that half the world’s web users don’t use a Latin alphabet and that it will be a major step change to the internet.
An over reliance on the English language for web addresses has probably been a bit of a bug bear for non-English speakers. The article gives Korea’s prefix as an example - .kr, whilst standing for Korea, isn’t how a Korean speaker would write the name of their own country.
However, looking at a smaller picture here, what impact could it have on piracy or internet filtering? At the moment, if you choose to go to www.illegalmovies.ch, you can pretty much be sure that you knew you were going to a contentious website. If the address was in Chinese, could you claim ignorance?
I remember using a Chinese website years ago in order to obtain some drivers for a piece of hardware. Whilst the whole website was in Chinese, I’d been given a relatively direct link and it didn’t take me long to figure out which driver I needed. Yes, it was a tad frustrating, but it wasn’t insurmountable. Applying the same logic to a Chinese piracy site, for example, it won’t take a genius to realise that the underlined text is a link to a film or piece of software, regardless of their inability to read the native language.
Perhaps I’m just being a bit negative here, but you just know that some people in authority will be thinking the same thing and before we know it we’ll have “Only English Internet for England” all because it’s easier to monitor.
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Loading ...Comment by - November 2, 2009 on 9:56 am
Oh thats a great & nice post, i really appreciate this idea.. This is really an interesting post so thank you so much for sharing such a fantastic idea.. This post is really encourage me to learn some of the languages..
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