How Global Should the Internet Be?

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The Difficulties Multiply

On June 11, for instance, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev publicly called for Russia to be assigned an Internet domain in the Cyrillic script. The Kremlin is concerned that Russian, once the main language throughout the Soviet Union, is losing ground to local languages and English.

Meeting Medvedev's demand isn't easy, though. The country abbreviation currently used to route traffic to Russia in Roman script is ".ru." The Cyrillic equivalent resembles the Roman characters "py," which is the country code for Paraguay. To get around the problem, Russia might instead have to be assigned the Cyrillic equivalent of "RF," short for Russian Federation, which includes a letter that has no equivalent in Latin alphabets, says Michael Yakushev, a board member of the coordinating body overseeing Russia's country domain name.

The issues don't end there. All countries using Cyrillic, including Belarus, Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, Ukraine, and a half-dozen Central Asian republics, must agree on how the script will be officially presented on the Internet to prevent confusion and error. Ditto for Arabic. About 600 million people use Arabic script, but only about 35% of them speak Arabic; the rest, says Siavash Shahshahani, a Tehran-based member of the body overseeing Arabic script issues, use Arabic script to represent languages such as Farsi, Urdu, and Sindhi. Differences in the way certain numbers and letters are written could prevent people from gaining access to global sites or even give rise to fraud, he says.

Accent on the Official Languages

Another vexing issue is whether there should be a limit on the number of new local-script domain names a country can obtain. India, for example, has more than 20 official languages and thus could obtain 20 local-script domains. Other countries with only one official language but multiple dialects or significant linguistic minorities complain they shouldn't be limited to a single domain.

Then there's the nagging question of accents, which are key to many languages but so far aren't allowed in domain names. That presents its own problems. Belgium, for instance, has three official languages, and while the spelling of its name in French and German doesn't require accents, the Dutch spelling does. If ICANN put a priority on adding support for accents, that could leave some parts of Belgium in the slow lane. So for now, the group says it will resolve the problem by fast-tracking only development of non-Roman scripts.

ICANN also introduced a rule that limits countries to applying only for scripts tied to their official languages. As a result, Australia can't ask to obtain the equivalent of .au in Chinese because Chinese isn't an official language there. But what about minority communities? Russia's Yakushev, for instance, thinks Russians living in the U.S. should be allowed to lobby for a Cyrillic character alternative for "United States," which would be used in addition to the Roman character abbreviation (.us) currently in use.

All these complex issues will take time to sort through, and every technical solution needs to be matched with social and political support. Some worry already that the rise of local-language domain names will lead to increased fragmentation of the Internet, or even to greater governmental control by repressive regimes, which could restrict access by limiting the languages supported in domain names.

China Introduces Interim System

"It's clearly going to be a mess," says Russia's Yakushev. But he and others at the Paris meeting passionately believe the transition is nonetheless essential to truly globalize the Net. "Imagine for a moment how inconvenient it would be if the Internet had been invented in China and each time you typed in an address you had to use Chinese characters," says Edmon Chung, the Hong Kong-based chief executive of the generic top-level domain .asia.

China already has taken the first steps toward a multilingual domain name system. It resolved Chinese script issues with Taiwan and Hong Kong and introduced an interim system that allows a Chinese-character domain name to be typed into computers. The Roman characters .cn are then automatically added for routing purposes. It's time, says Chung, for the real thing to be implemented in China—and for the rest of the world to follow suit with other scripts.

That will be easier said than done. "We are an organization that has a very narrow technical function," says Paul Levins, ICANN's executive officer and vice-president for corporate affairs. "Yet we often find ourselves in the middle of sensitive issues that are often difficult to predict." At least this time nobody is getting thrown out of the meeting.

Schenker is a BusinessWeek correspondent in Paris.