The use of non-Latin characters in Internet addresses is a key step to opening up the Web and making it more “personalized” for billions of users, the head of the nonprofit body that oversees Internet addresses said Monday.
Rod Beckstrom, CEO of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, said around half of the people using the Internet do not use Latin script. But the recent approval of Arabic and Russian characters for domain name suffixes will help bridge that linguistic barrier and encourage more users online, he said.
“This is part of the Internet becoming more truly global,” Beckstrom told The Associated Press on the sidelines of an event celebrating the introduction of such suffixes in Arabic. “We see this just opening up and making the Internet more global.”
“It seems to be a more important offering for the psyche of people. Our language is part of our culture and our identity, and having … the ability to express our domain in our chosen language is something that people feel very powerfully about,” Beckstrom said.
Earlier this month, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Russia become the first nations to get Internet addresses entirely in non-Latin characters.
Egypt, for example, secured the right to the “.masr” domain (written in Arabic).
The step marked a fundamental shift in the Internet domain name system since its creation in the 1980s.
Until the approvals were received for Arabic and Russian, Web sites had to end their addresses with suffixes like “.com” that were written in Latin characters — a restriction that posed challenges to expanding the reach of the Net to people who could not read such script.
Beckstrom, in comments echoed earlier by Egypt’s Information Technology Minister Tarek Kamel, said lifting the language barrier would allow new and unprecedented access to the Internet.
Kamel told reporters earlier…