Finally global

INTERNET: As the internet celebrates its 40th birthday, the World Wide Web is finally becoming truly international. Soon, letters from non-Latin alphabets can be used in domain names.

First, the history. At the end of October 1969, a student at UCLA named Charley Kline sent the first data across the then-named Arpanet to the Stanford Research Institute. English has dominated the internet since then. Automatic translation programs have allowed people to create and read web sites in various languages, but the domain name had to be registered in Latin characters.

Beginning on 16 November this year, countries can apply for domain names written in their own language using non-Latin characters — until now they were limited to, for example, .jp for Japan or .ru for Russia. “The coming introduction of non-Latin characters represents the biggest technical change to the internet since it was created four decades ago," says ICANN Chairman Peter Dengate Thrush.Based in Seoul, the International Corporation for assigned names and numbers (ICANN) is the organization that coordinates the internet’s naming system.

"This is an historic move toward the internationalization of the internet," says Rod Beckstrom, president of ICANN.

Work remains to be done. For example, diacritics are not yet recognized. Another concern is that hackers could increasingly use hologlyphs, which are letter or number combinations that are difficult to distinguish, such as “GOOGLE” and “G00GLE” (with zeros instead of Os). Experts say this could lead to increased use of “phishing” fake websites aimed at tricking users.

Such concerns to do not make the move towards a truly globalized web any less satisfying. "This is only the first step, but it is an incredibly big one and an historic move toward the internationalization of the Internet," says Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's president and CEO.