Non-English domains sought

Had the Internet been invented in China, you’d need some fluency in Chinese to type Web addresses. But as a U.S. invention, the Internet is in English.

People around the world are losing patience with that. They already have keyboards, software and Web sites in their own languages.

Now they want Internet domain names, but the Internet’s key oversight agency allows that only in limited circumstances.

And that’s one of the reasons countries led by Pakistan, India and China have been pressuring the United States to cede control of the Internet’s addressing system at the UN World Summit on the Information Society, which opens today in Tunisia.

“You really have to focus on how you get a multilingual domain name in scripts other than Latin,” said Nitin Desai, special adviser to the summit for UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

More than 30% of Internet users know English, according to InternetWorldStats.com, compared with 10% to 20% of the world’s population by some estimates. That means Internet growth opportunities lie largely with non-English speakers.

Native-language search engines can help some users get around language barriers, but local businesses and organizations still can’t easily advertise their brands.

Non-English domains also would let multinational businesses reach potential customers in their own languages.

The Internet’s main traffic directories know only 37 characters: the 26 letters of the Latin script used in English, the 10 numerals and a hyphen. Engineers have developed a system to trick those directories into recognizing hundreds of other languages, but technical, linguistic and political hurdles prevent more widespread use.

“Human beings didn’t design all their various alphabets and languages in any thoughtful engineering process,” said Cary Karp, who heads the group that runs the .museum domain.

For now, Karp’s organization is supporting several languages including French, Lithuanian and Spanish. But the suffix, .museum, remains in English. The same goes for all the other suffixes, including the Internet’s two most popular top-level domains, .com and .net.

Since 2001, .com and .net have been able to accept about 30 non-Latin scripts covering more than 350 tongues. And China’s .cn, Taiwan’s .tw, Japan’s .jp and South Korea’s .kr have supported their languages for a few years.

Others are more recent: Thailand’s .th began giving owners of English names the Thai equivalent in 2004, the same year .info, .biz and Germany’s .de started accepting the umlaut and other German characters.

The .org domain added German, Hungarian, Latvian and others this year, while India’s .in will start offering Tamil and Malayalam scripts early next year. Others to follow include Kannada, a language spoken primarily in southern India.

“I browse the Internet to some extent, but I will use it even more if everything is in Kannada,” said Narasimha, a Bangalore office assistant who uses a single name.

Despite the stated demand, only 1.5% of all domains worldwide are in another language, according to VeriSign Inc., which runs .com and .net. In Thailand, fewer than 1 in 6 have claimed the Thai equivalent of English .th names, though they’re being given away for free.

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