ICANN Leaps in the Wrong Direction
I knew of the talks about this for quite some time, but it appears that now they’re no longer just talks. I still think that it’s a leap in the wrong direction, however, because allowing characters that aren’t in the Latin alphabet in domain names encourages people to use their own native languages on the Internet even more and that certainly isn’t going to help improve international communication. Improved international communication requires one main world language, which should be the language that already has the most non-native speakers, which is quite obviously English.
With that in mind, a step in the right direction would be to very strongly encourage all sites that are not aimed at people who speak English but have more than a strictly local scope to add English translations for their content. Later, that strong encouragement could turn into some slight pressure and then perhaps become even more than that. All of this would obviously only apply to the layout and the content posted by the site’s administrators and not to any user-generated content that the site in question might host. This would be the way to help international communication instead of harming it, giving as many people as possible a chance to access information from as many different sources as possible.
But that article does make a good point when it mentions the people who live in countries that use other alphabets and who struggle to type domain names as they currently are because their keyboards don’t even have those characters. That is indeed a real problem, because people must be able to easily use the Internet before we can get to improving international communication through it. But this problem can have solutions that don’t require such changes, solutions that’d allow people to access domains that are named using Latin characters by typing the name using their own alphabet.
The article does mention that workarounds that do just that exist, but that they don’t work on all computers, which leads me to believe that these workarounds are in the form of applications that people can install to translate the domain names they type into those that their DNS can understand. But what if these applications would be moved away from the users and to the ISPs? After all, if the DNS translates the domain name into the appropriate IP address, it shouldn’t be a problem to add another service to translate a domain name written in some other alphabet into the “real” name, which would still use Latin characters. Sites that wish to be accessible like this could register their “secondary” names somewhere and everything would continue as normal, without affecting either individual users or the Internet as a whole in any way.
Of course, such an additional service would cost a little to maintain and some fees would need to be added in order to pay for it. Those fees could be levied on the domain name holders who wish to register such “secondary” names for their domains, so this tax could double as a deterrent, discouraging people from using other languages in this international space a little while also giving them the possibility to do just that in every way if they still desire it.
Some may say that this is much ado about nothing, mainly because it won’t affect them in any way. However, I think it’s a very real issue because it signifies that this fragmentation of the Internet is being accepted at the highest level. It’s one thing when people create non-local sites that are only in their own language and that language is not English or when ISPs allow their customers to access sites by typing domain names using different alphabets, but quite another when ICANN makes significant changes in order to allow people to even register domain names written entirely with characters from other alphabets. It moves the Internet away from the idea of an international space where we all come together and basically says that our differences are more important than our similarities. Someone commented that “there is a danger that the Internet – a tool for culture, information, sharing and dialog on a non-national level – may become irreversibly fragmented” and I agree. Such fragmentation existed before and always will exist, but having it endorsed at the highest level changes things, and that change is not for the best…
You might have noticed that I didn’t say anything about the potential risk of increased illegal activity on sites that have domain names written with characters from other alphabets, especially if they’re hosted on servers from countries where that specific alphabet is not used. Quite a few people seem to be worried about that, apparently mentioning potential terrorist activity more often than not, but I highly doubt that something like this could pose a real problem to any authorities that take their role seriously. This concern seems to be just one more result of the fear that so many people have ended up living in, which is a different issue entirely.
But there is one thing about this idea that is relevant to the matter at hand: It signifies that people would obviously perceive such sites as a separate area of the Internet. That said, one can also assume that those who would primarily use such sites would likely end up perceiving those that use the Latin alphabet as being in a separate area of the Internet as well. And that’s exactly what I’ve been talking about so far, the danger of doing something like this, segregation…
I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens; there’s little else to do at this point. Maybe it’ll really end up being much ado about nothing, though I quite firmly doubt that. On the other hand, if it really will result in people focusing on what sets them apart from each other and rejecting those who are different even more, maybe this could at least serve as a solid argument against any further developments in the same direction…
