When Web site addresses using writing systems like Chinese and Arabic were introduced back in 2009, it was hailed as a step that would transform the Internet.
But 12 years later, the vast majority of the Web remains wedded to the Roman alphabet — and ICANN, the organization in charge of protecting the Internet’s infrastructure, is on a mission to change it.
“The truth of the matter is that even if half the world’s population uses the Internet today, it’s the elite of the world — mainly those living in cities, mainly those with a good income,” Goran Marby, head of the US-based non-profit, said. “Shouldn’t we give people the opportunity to use their own scripts, their own keyboards, their own narratives?”
Photo: AFP
It’s thanks to ICANN — the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — that when you type an address at the top of the screen, your computer can find the Web page you’re looking for.
These days it’s theoretically possible to type an address in more than 150 scripts, including obscure ones like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, and watch the page load.
But large parts of the internet remain incompatible with writing systems other than the Latin alphabet. Many US Web site, for example, would not allow you to make a purchase or subscribe to their newsletter if you entered an e-mail address in Tamil or Hebrew.
When a group of bodies including ICANN tested the world’s top 1,000 websites last year, only 11 percent accepted a Chinese or Arabic e-mail address when trying, for example, to contact them via an online form.
One of ICANN’s priorities for the coming years is to ensure that 28 commonly used writing scripts are usable across the internet. The problem isn’t restricted to the West: in China even WeChat, the country’s most popular messaging app, does not recognise e-mail addresses written in Chinese characters.
Chinese web addresses often use strings of numbers, like the dating site 5201314.com.
This is partly because it can be hard to remember how to spell a Web address in pinyin, the romanized version of Chinese, and partly because number-based puns work well in Mandarin (“520” sounds like “I love you”). In many parts of the world, people have simply tried to adapt to an Internet that doesn’t speak their language.
“It never even crossed my mind,” said Cairo finance worker Hadeer al-Shater, when asked whether she had considered setting up an Arabic-script e-mail account.
“The whole point is to be able to communicate with the rest of the world. And unfortunately, Arabic is not very practical on the Internet,” she said.
Marby points out that the internet of today grew largely out of the work of US and European computer scientists. As a result, it has disproportionately benefited those who can read and write in Latin-based scripts.
An estimated 37 percent of the world’s population — 2.9 billion people — have still never used the Internet, according to the UN’s International Telecommunication Union, 96 percent of them in developing countries.
And Marby argues that this number will remain high if people who don’t use the Latin alphabet are locked out.
“We think it’s very important to make sure that the original idea of the internet — to connect people — doesn’t get forgotten,” he said.
Progress has been made on some fronts. Users of Google’s popular Gmail service, for example, have been able to exchange messages with people whose email addresses use non-Latin characters since 2014. In Russia, about 40 percent of companies have a version of their website that uses a Cyrillic “top-level domain” (TLD) — meaning the suffix of a Web site, such as “.com” or “.org.” But while most Russian hosting services allow email addresses with a Cyrillic domain, the part before the “at” symbol remains in the Latin alphabet, the Russian Coordination Center for TLDs explains on its Web site.
Marby stresses that “universal acceptance” — the idea of all scripts being usable across the Internet — will never happen unless companies help fix the issue on their end. “We have to continue to work with software developers and manufacturers to make sure they actually do this,” he said.
In the long-run, he argues, universal acceptance will be good for business by allowing companies to reach new markets.
“But this is not something that we’re doing over the next six months,” he said. “This is going to take years.”
May 6 to May 12 Those who follow the Chinese-language news may have noticed the usage of the term zhuge (豬哥, literally ‘pig brother,’ a male pig raised for breeding purposes) in reports concerning the ongoing #Metoo scandal in the entertainment industry. The term’s modern connotations can range from womanizer or lecher to sexual predator, but it once referred to an important rural trade. Until the 1970s, it was a common sight to see a breeder herding a single “zhuge” down a rustic path with a bamboo whip, often traveling large distances over rugged terrain to service local families. Not only
Ahead of incoming president William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20 there appear to be signs that he is signaling to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and that the Chinese side is also signaling to the Taiwan side. This raises a lot of questions, including what is the CCP up to, who are they signaling to, what are they signaling, how with the various actors in Taiwan respond and where this could ultimately go. In the last column, published on May 2, we examined the curious case of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) heavyweight Tseng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) — currently vice premier
The last time Mrs Hsieh came to Cihu Park in Taoyuan was almost 50 years ago, on a school trip to the grave of Taiwan’s recently deceased dictator. Busloads of children were brought in to pay their respects to Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正), known as Generalissimo, who had died at 87, after decades ruling Taiwan under brutal martial law. “There were a lot of buses, and there was a long queue,” Hsieh recalled. “It was a school rule. We had to bow, and then we went home.” Chiang’s body is still there, under guard in a mausoleum at the end of a path
Last week the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) released a set of very strange numbers on Taiwan’s wealth distribution. Duly quoted in the Taipei Times, the report said that “The Gini coefficient for Taiwanese households… was 0.606 at the end of 2021, lower than Australia’s 0.611, the UK’s 0.620, Japan’s 0.678, France’s 0.676 and Germany’s 0.727, the agency said in a report.” The Gini coefficient is a measure of relative inequality, usually of wealth or income, though it can be used to evaluate other forms of inequality. However, for most nations it is a number from .25 to .50