U.N. delegates: English isn't good enough

UN DELEGATES: ENGLISH ISN'T GOOD ENOUGH
[SOURCE: C-Net|News.com, AUTHOR: Declan McCullagh]
When the pioneering engineers who invented the Internet began crafting the modern domain name system, they came up with a rule that was reasonable at the time: Domains must use only English-language characters. A November 1983 specification proposed that domain names would have "only letters, digits and hyphen"--which meant that Cyrillic, Arabic, kanji or Chinese letters and characters could not be used in domains. Not even diacritical marks employed in German, French and Spanish were permitted. On Wednesday, delegates to a United Nations summit complained that the ASCII-only choice was representative of an Internet culture that is far too English-centric and that fails to respect other languages. "This new society leaves people isolated, marginalized," said Adama Samassékou, a former Mali government official who is the president of the African Academy of Languages. "I think the digital divide is not as important as the linguistic divide. And that's the one we should be bridging in order to guarantee the democratic governance of the Internet."
http://news.com.com/U.N.+delegates+English+isnt+good+enough/2100-1028_3-...

* Care urged with language domain names
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, warned Wednesday that a mistake in a creating more Web addresses using non-Latin letters could "permanently break the Internet."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/UN_INTERNET_GOVERNANCE?SITE=MAQUI...