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The Internet and becoming “Inter”-national

For many people who are born and raised on American soil, the Internet is a limitless source of information that doesn’t require much more digging than a Google search. But for many others throughout the world, that access to Internet content relies on whether that material is translated and available on a internationalized domain name (IDN) compatible with their country and language. It’s really easy for English-speakers to ignore this invisible international divide because we have plenty of English-based websites to amuse ourselves with. But imagine someone whose only language was Russian, or Arabic, or Portuguese–they would be hindered by a language barrier. In some countries that do not use the same alphabet we are used to, they would require a separate keyboard, or additional computer software in order to type in a website address as simple of “http://www.google.com”!

To illustrate this disparity, take a look at the graphic above. What sticks out? Perhaps the fact that less than 10% of the world’s population is a native English speaker, and furthermore, less than 30% of Internet users indicate that English is their primary language? Yet close to 60% of general web content caters to those who speak English. (Although it is nice to note that Japanese Internet users seem to have taken advantage of IDNs based on the overwhelming number of Japanese web content on those domains.)

One factor in this favoritism is the dominance of alphanumerical characters being used for Internet addresses, and this in turn arose from these addresses being controlled by the U.S. Department of Commerce. But it’s a definite step in the right direction for the Department to be handing over control to a global entity called ICANN. With this handover of power, we can expect more IDNs to start popping up on the Internet compared to the measly 2% chunk of all domain names that IDNs previously occupied.

So far, it’s cute how some IDNs have been used (.ly in bit.ly or .io being use by sites like Github), but it’s time that other underrepresented cultures and countries have a greater opportunity to express themselves on the Internet. With this expanded freedom, it can expected that people who weren’t previously exposed a lot to the Internet can embrace the concept and contribute to its growth. If the Internet up to the recent day were visualized as a map where groups of people were connected by edges labeled with common languages, there would be many unconnected components; but with the increased variety via IDNs, it’s possible to virtually connect the whole whole more tightly and examine those relationships without the barrier of language coming in between.

 

Source: http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/10/13/internet-300-million-domain-names.html

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