" ICANN " Says JI HAAN to Hindi Domain Names

News
Date : 03.11.09

The international organization that oversees internet addresses on Friday approved the use in domain names of Hindi, mandarin, Hebrew, Korean and 12 other languages whose scripts are not based on the roman/Latin alphabet.
The move which came in the end of six years of discussion and technical work by members of the internet cooperation for assigned names and numbers (ICANN).
Will dramatically expands the reach and use of internet to hundreds of millions of people who don’t know the roman alphabet and who might never learn it.
For starters, icann said, the change will be limited to domains controlled by national govt. – in India’s case .in and .cn in the case of china. This will enable writing of internet address containing from start to finish.
Using languages for other generic and universal domains such as .com and .org will follow – perhaps as early as 2011 – once rules are developed for multiple language names. Icann said at the end its board meeting in Seoul on Friday.
The introduction of non-latin characters represent the biggest technical change to the internet since it was created four decades ago’. Icann chairman peter dengate thrush said, ‘right now internet address endings are limited to Latin characters a to z. but the fast track process is the first step in bringing the 1000000 characters of the languages of the world online for domain names.
The so called fast track process will be launched on can apply for nov. 16. countries internet extensions reflecting their name – and reflecting their name – and made up of characters from their national language. If the application meet criteria that includes govt and community support and a stability evaluation , the applicants will be approved to start accepting registrations. Sixteen languages have been approved to begin with.
It is possible that eventually even other Indian languages can get registered since the icann charter allows even “territories” to register their languages.
If that happens, along with the rapid advances being made in voice-to-script and script-to-voice software, the internet will becomes accessible to nearly every Indian with even basic literacy, regardless of languages.
This is only the first step, but it is an incredible big one and historic move towards the internationalization of the internet ‘, said rod beck strom, icann president and CEO. “ The first country that will participate will… help to bring the first of billions more people online---- people who never use roman character in their daily lives.”