For the past nine years that I’ve tracked Internet usage statistics I’ve been confused as to why worldwide web saturation is so minimal. There are close to 7 billion people on this planet yet less than 2 billion are on the net. Granted, I understand there are huge portions of humanity living in underdeveloped circumstances but when one averages estimates from the IEA and Greenpeace, the percentage of humans without access to electricity is one quarter of the total world population. I also realize that poverty prevents people from owning computers and paying for web access, but still, to me, the numbers have never added up. Even more confusing to me was how world Internet saturation hit a plateau a few years back. The overall percentage of humans using the interwebs has been riding at 25% for a long while. I didn’t get it.
Now, thanks to ICANN, I get it.
On October 30, 2009 the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) authorized the creation/registration of top-level domains that comply with the Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) standard. Translation:
Individuals and businesses can now register domain names with non-Latin characters Chinese, Russian, Arabic, etc.
I hear you balking. Right now you’re scratching your head and wondering if I’ve finally gone off the deep end. You’re waiting for me to make my point. How could ICANN allowing people to register non-Latin character domain names result in anything but another domain name gold rush? Bear with me.
You’re a clever person. You might even have a college degree or two. If you’re a native of France or Germany or Switzerland and you’re here, reading this article, then you’ve already mastered a second language. The thing is, the world is full of clever people who don’t speak a second language, much less a third or fourth. Imagine if all the existing domain names looked something like this:
That’s the way web addresses appear to the majority of the planet’s population. Naturally, foreign-language pages display text in the appropriate characters for the speaker but if I was raised reading and writing only Hindi, I would find Latin-character domain names incredibly off-putting. Each time I glanced down at my combo-character keyboard, a nagging, fleeting question would run through my mind.
"Is the Internet trying to tell me that my native language isn’t good enough?"
ICANN has been working on Internationalizing the language of domain names since 1998.
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The goal wasn’t easy because computer code (including browser/web code) is written with Latin characters. A URL has to be standardized so that any server and/or browser can interpret it. Individuals can’t just go around making up their own code and expect it to work. There’s a reason that blogs look like crap in IE6. Microsoft’s ancient browser is incapable of rendering CSS2 according to standard protocols. The same logic applies to domain names. In order for a server/browser to recognize a URL as a URL, that URL has to be written in a standardized code. Internationalized Domain Names are ASCII strings transcribed via Punycode. While coming up with the IDN protocols probably wasn’t terribly difficult, navigating the political landscape all the way to ICANN approval must have been one hell of a ride.
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Now, don’t go off thinking you’re free to register non-Latin porn domain names. ICANN has only bestowed IDN registration for country-code TLDs. The dot coms, dot nets and dot orgs are down the road.
Let me get back to my original point. This is huge and I’m not the only person saying that. ICANN itself calls this "the biggest technical change" to the interwebs in 40 years. IDNs are going to open the Internet to millions if not billions of new users. They won’t be reading English. They won’t be typing in English. But they will be humans with basic human desires and needs. How will you deal with this new pool of potential customers? Is this going to be the break our industry has been longing for? Are IDNs going to bring a monstrous mass of hackers, scammers and freeloaders?
The Internet just got bigger. What are you going to do about it?