Internet Addresses to Become More International

Continuing our focus on the Internet (it is, after all, 40 years since the Internet started to exist as the ARPANET): the ICANN recently approved non-Latin web addresses. In layman’s terms, web addresses will no longer be limited to characters within or similar to the English alphabet, or numbers. We’ll probably see website domains in Arabic, Chinese, and Russian scripts.

It’s news that should please the Internet’s non-English users and domain name speculators alike. The former will now enjoy a web that’s no longer limited to English, potentially opening it up to new users. The latter will now have more names to grab online, in the hopes that they can sell it later on for a higher price. I have no idea how to spell “house” in Arabic, but you can bet someone will secure that word once it can be registered as a domain name.

Personally, I think making the foundation of the internet—domain names—more internationally will help the Internet go beyond its heavily-English origins, but at least one reader of the BBC source article shared a great insight: “There is a danger that the internet – a tool for culture, information – sharing and dialog on a non-national level, may become irreversibly fragmented”.

What the reader meant was that, with web addresses set to become more friendly to locals throughout the world, the need to understand what’s currently the universal language of the net (English) diminishes. Why bother exploring the world wide web when there’s already a lot available in your own language/script? Ironically, this push to make the web more universal may end up making it more fragmented.

What do you think? Feel free to comment below.