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Bridging the digital divide

Today, having a Web presence is seen as a basic need for not only businesses, but individuals as well. But people need to think really hard about their website’s URL (uniform resource locator also known as domain name), especially when they are just starting up.

Customers at a Chinese Internet cafe in Beijing. Multilingual domain names will enable many non-English speaking communities to come online, which is extremely relevant to the Asia-Pacific. Photo: Bloomberg

Customers at a Chinese Internet cafe in Beijing. Multilingual domain names will enable many non-English speaking communities to come online, which is extremely relevant to the Asia-Pacific. Photo: Bloomberg

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Today, having a Web presence is seen as a basic need for not only businesses, but individuals as well. But people need to think really hard about their website’s URL (uniform resource locator also known as domain name), especially when they are just starting up.

Much of the Internet’s extraordinary growth belongs to users in developing economies, such as Asia, looking to grow their Internet economy — a sector Boston Consulting Group recently reported to be growing at 15 to 25 per cent each year.

We are now entering the next phase of the Internet — providing more Internet real estate for the next billion of users and entrepreneurs — many of whom are also non-English users. How can the Internet community, including in Asia, contribute to this process so it can better serve users in this region?

CHARTING THE NET’S FUTURE

Most of us are very familiar with the .com, .net, .org domain names. Local communities would also be familiar with the country domain names, such as .sg in Singapore, .my in Malaysia, .id in Indonesia, and so on. Many local businesses raise their local credibility by owning a domain name ending with their country code.

Currently, there are more than 271 million domain names registered worldwide. While this may seem a large number, it is but a fraction of the 2.6 billion existing Internet users. These domain names are also registered mostly in English (unless the language uses Latin-based characters), which does not fully cater for large non-English-speaking communities.

Since late last year, new generic top level domains (new gTLDs) have become a reality and allow for alternative options such as “.eat”, “.pizza” and even .(insert-your-brand-here). This gives people the option of registering for a new domain that best represents them and their product or brand. For example, “johndoe.com” represents Mr John Doe or his firm, but may not represent his pizza business, which may be better represented by “johndoe.pizza”.

More than 400 new gTLDs have so far been rolled out by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) — the coordinator of the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) — and many registry operators of these new gTLDs have already made them available to the market.

Within a year, over two million people, firms or organisations have registered a domain name under these new gTLDS. In the near future, there will be over 1300 new gTLDs available, and many more in the longer term.

A MULTILINGUAL INTERNET?

New gTLDs also expands into other languages — also known as Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs). The first four new international domain names that were delegated into the Internet’s root system were شبكة (Arabic for “Web” or “network”), онлайн and сайт (Russian for “online” and “website” respectively), and 游戏 (Chinese for “game”).

More IDNs are being rolled out and these multilingual domain names will enable many non-English-speaking communities to come online, which is extremely relevant to the region here in the Asia-Pacific.

Multilingual domain names also help Asian firms concerned with branding and “searchability”. For example, instead of having to type “sohu.com” for a games website, a native Chinese user could type “搜狐游戏”.

This bridges another aspect of the digital divide — the lack of localised content and navigational tools — that will support efforts to enable the next few billion people to come online.

New gTLDs also offer more interesting ways to present and explore content online. For example, search engines can improve the way they index and guide users to the right content websites.

Users could narrow a search more accurately by searching for a shop with a filter for the “.shop” domain. New gTLDs can also provide an added dimension to navigate cyberspace with real world categories such as by geography such as “.okinawa” or “.london”, or other categories such as “.bank”, “.lawyer” or “.software”.

In Singapore, we can expect creative uses of the new gTLDs and IDNs, including .新加坡 and .சிங்கப்பூர் (Singapore in Chinese and Tamil, respectively); and from that of local-based organisations such as .changiairport, .starhub, .wilmar, .genting and .temasek, which are also in the pipeline.

As new gTLDs and IDNs are being rolled out, we will need to be involved in their adoption and evolution. For example, many software programme, emails, and online forms still do not recognise domain names beyond the conventional ones (.com, .net, .org and so on). This will affect the acceptance and use of new gTLDs as well as IDNs that are longer or use different scripts. Internet companies, email providers and specifically software programmers will need to work together to accommodate them.

To support the use of IDNs, linguistic experts, domain name operators, and community representatives will need to come together to determine what scripts or alphabets/characters in their writing system can be used for an IDN of their language. This is especially pertinent to communities that use more than one script or writing system for their language such as Japanese, which uses four different writing systems: Hiragana, katakana, kanji (Chinese characters) and ASCII characters.

For a region with one of the world’s largest Internet communities, Asia needs to be involved in such conversations to ensure that new gTLDs and IDNs work for us. The ICANN Asia Pacific Hub was established to facilitate the region’s participation in such conversations and to address and bridge any gaps in culture, language and processes to ensure that the region’s voices are heard.

The Internet has come a long way and will continue to change as more and more people from different communities come online. Everyone should work together to ensure that the Internet can continue to evolve with the way we use it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Low Jia-Rong is the Head of Strategy and Initiatives for the Asia Pacific region at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

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