A Multilingual Web Goes Live: Arabic and Cyrillic domain addresses are switched on

From David Talbot in Technology Review:

Multilingual Web content has been around for years. Now Web domain names in non-Latin languages are finally arriving–including Arabic addresses launched in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates earlier this month; Cyrillic, launched in Russia last Thursday; and soon Chinese–easing Web access for hundreds of millions of people around the world.

“This is the biggest change in the Internet in 40 years,” says Tina Dam, senior director of international domain names for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, which is working on implementing 21 international applications for domain names in 11 languages. “You should have seen the Russian celebration of this, it was so emotional. Suddenly their own language can be used.”

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Nevertheless, the impact will be enormous around the world, [Veni Markovsi, the Russian and eastern European representative to ICANN,] says. “Think what would have happened if the Internet was created in China, and we in the U.S. needed to write the Web address in Chinese. And suddenly the world Internet community says, ‘Well, now you can type your Web address in Latin characters.’ That is the same feeling is for people who don’t know Latin [letters]. Suddenly you will have people who might get online because they are not going to be afraid of the keyboard.”

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