• The UNESCO and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced a new agreement to enhance linguistic diversity in the digital world. This will make the Internet more accessible to hundreds of millions of users.

• Under this new agreement, UNESCO and ICANN will cooperate to support the secure use of additional scripts and languages in the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS), encompassing the domain names and email addresses that are key for access and online communication. 

• They will also work together to drive the universal acceptance of all domain names and email addresses, regardless of character length, language, or script, in all Internet-enabled applications, devices, and systems.

What is Internationalised Domain Name?

• Each resource over the Internet is assigned a unique number, typically known as Internet Protocol (IP) Address. These are a set of numbers separated by dots. It is okay for connected computers to address each other by a number. When it comes to humans to address these resources, the same logic does not work, since there are millions (possibly billions) of resources connected over the Internet. It would be quite impossible to remember the resources by numbers. 

• Domain Name System (DNS) provides means to assign a name to each entity over the network. A domain name refers to a specific resource/machine in human-readable form as a text string instead of string of numbers.

• The Domain Name System has expanded dramatically in recent years, with the addition of new and longer top-level domains, as well as those in different scripts. 

• Domain names that use various languages and scripts are called Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs).

• IDNs enable people around the world to use domain names in local languages and scripts. IDNs are formed using characters from different scripts, such as Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic or Devanagari. These are encoded by the Unicode standard and used as allowed by relevant IDN protocols.

Significance of IDNs

• Today more than 5.4 billion people regularly use the Internet. Most of these current and potential users communicate in their local languages and scripts. 

• IDNs will help ensure that everyone has the ability to experience the full social and economic power of the Internet. IDNs allow Internet users to choose the domain name and email address in the language and script that best suits their needs and culture. 

• Universal Acceptance (UA) is necessary to ensure that all of these domain names and email addresses work seamlessly on the Internet. 

• However, many of the checks used by many software applications to validate domain names and email addresses often use rules created many years ago, which do not support all domain names, especially those in local languages and scripts. Organisations and stakeholders need to take steps to ensure their systems are UA-ready to enjoy these benefits. 

• IDNs are essential to promoting linguistic diversity. Only 10 per cent of the top 1,000 websites can currently accept IDNs. Further only, 22 per cent of global email services under generic top-level domains support email addresses in local languages.

• Supporting domain names in local scripts and language, and their universal acceptance, is essential to enabling a diverse and multilingual online experience.

• Today, there are only around 400 languages fully accessible online, representing just a fraction of the world’s 7,000 spoken languages.

• ICANN has instituted the IDN Program to assist in the development and promotion of a multilingual Internet using IDNs. The program is primarily focused on the planning and implementation of IDN top-level domains (TLDs).

What is ICANN?

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was formed in 1998. It is a not-for-profit partnership of people from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable. ICANN's mission is to help ensure a stable, secure, and unified global Internet. To reach another person on the Internet, you need to type an address – a name or a number – into your computer or other device. That address must be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN helps coordinate and support these unique identifiers across the world. ICANN doesn't control content on the Internet. It cannot stop spam and it doesn't deal with access to the Internet. But through its coordination role of the Internet's naming system, it does have an important impact on the expansion and evolution of the Internet. ICANN's headquarters is in Los Angeles.

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