As early as 2009, when website addresses using writing systems such as Chinese and Arabic were introduced, it was hailed as a step that would change the Internet.
But 12 years later, the vast majority of the Internet is still associated with the Roman alphabet-the mission of ICANN, the organization responsible for protecting Internet infrastructure, is to change it.
“The truth of the matter is that even though half of the world’s population today uses the Internet, they are the world’s elites-mainly those who live in cities, mainly those with good incomes,” a non-governmental organization based in the United States. The person in charge Goran Marby (Goran Marby) said. -Profit, told AFP in an interview.
“Should we not give people the opportunity to use their own scripts, their own keyboards, their own narratives?”
Thanks to ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. When you type the address at the top of the screen, your computer can find the webpage you are looking for.
Nowadays, it is theoretically possible to enter addresses in more than 150 characters, including obscure characters such as ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, and observe the page loading.
But most of the Internet content is still incompatible with writing systems other than the Latin alphabet. For example, if you enter an email address in Tamil or Hebrew, many US websites will not allow you to purchase or subscribe to their newsletter.
Last year, a group of organizations including ICANN tested the top 1,000 websites around the world. For example, when trying to contact them via an online form, only 11% accepted email addresses in Chinese or Arabic.
West-centric since conception
One of ICANN’s priorities for the next few years is to ensure that 28 commonly used scripts are available on the Internet.
The problem is not limited to the West: In China, even WeChat, the country’s most popular messaging app, cannot recognize e-mail addresses written in Chinese characters.
Chinese URLs usually use numeric strings, such as the dating site 5201314.com.
This is partly because it is difficult to remember how to spell URLs in pinyin (the Romanized version of Chinese), and partly because number-based puns are effective in Mandarin (“520” sounds like “I love you”).
In many parts of the world, people are just trying to adapt to the Internet without speaking their language.
“I never even thought about it,” said Hadeer al-Shater, a Cairo financial worker, when asked if she had considered setting up an e-mail account in Arabic script.
“The point is to be able to communicate with the rest of the world. Unfortunately, Arabic is not very practical on the Internet,” she said.
Marby pointed out that today’s Internet is largely derived from the work of computer scientists in the United States and Europe. As a result, it greatly benefits those who can read and write in Latin.
According to data from the United Nations International Telecommunication Union, an estimated 37% of the world’s population (2.9 billion people) have never used the Internet, and 96% of them are in developing countries.
Maby believes that if people who do not use the Latin alphabet are turned away, this number will remain high.
“We think it’s very important to ensure that the original idea of the Internet-connecting people-is not forgotten,” he said.
Is it suitable for business?
Progress has been made in some areas. For example, since 2014, users of Google’s popular Gmail service can exchange messages with people whose email addresses use non-Latin characters.
In Russia, approximately 40% of companies have a version of a website that uses Cyrillic “top-level domains” (TLD)-meaning the suffix of the website, such as “.com” or “.org”.
However, the Russian Top-Level Domain Coordination Center explained on its website that although most Russian hosting services allow email addresses to use Cyrillic domains, the part before the “at” symbol remains in the Latin alphabet.
Marby emphasized that unless the company ultimately helps solve the problem, “generally accepted”—the idea that all scripts can be used on the Internet—will never happen.
“We must continue to work with software developers and manufacturers to ensure that they really do this,” he said.
He believes that in the long run, by allowing companies to enter new markets, general acceptance will benefit companies.
“But this is not something we will do in the next six months,” he said. “This will take years.”
