At a UN meeting last month, a bespectacled Swede made a small, barely noticed announcement that nevertheless represented a pivotal moment in the history of the Internet.
"Regarding the technical implementation for the World Wide Web, we are done," Patrik Faltstrom told the Internet Governance Forum.
By "we are done," he meant that following a decade of hard work by a global consortium of engineers and linguists, they had finally decided on a document that will enable all the world's languages to be fully represented on the Internet. People will be able to type in addresses in their own language, search in their own language and move around the Internet in their own language.
The challenge was every bit as immense as it sounds. The Internet was designed to work with the English alphabet -- "a" to "z," and the numbers "1" through "9." Useful symbols rapidly made their way into the system -- plus, minus, dash, and so on -- each represented with a particular code (or, as Internet engineers insist on calling it, an "identifier"). Agreeing on identifiers was easy at first, but as Internet use spread across the globe, people started asking for more to be added to fit other languages, whether an accent on a letter, or an entirely different alphabet.
Global balancing act
As languages have spread and developed, some elements have changed and some stayed the same. Some have grown to have different meanings. Some look identical and are anything but.
One thing is for certain: Everyone is unshakeable in their belief that their language is as valid as any other. No matter how wonderful the Internet is, it does not override culture and history. The result has been a very careful balance.
"No script and no person will be happy with the definition of identifiers," Faltstrom said.
"Everyone will be unhappy. We just have to find a standard that makes people the least unhappy," he said.
It can be difficult for an English speaker to grasp the problem. For example, the small dots over the "a" and "o" in Faltstrom's surname carry significance and meaning. Because it is a Western language, we are able to view it as an "a" and an "o" with some dots. Not so with different alphabets. Fortunately, there is a real-world example that makes this global balancing act more understandable.
Richard Haigh is a British Web designer from the city of Nottingham and the proud owner of "?.com." He has decided he wants to use the site to cover the debate over Britain's possible future adoption of the euro.
"When it does kick off, I want to provide somewhere where people can voice their concerns," he explains.
Despite having "no personal belief either way," he thinks that he's on to something unique with his pound-symbol domain name.
But Haigh doesn't actually own "?.com." He owns "xn--9a.com" -- the identifier used to represent the pound symbol. In fact, ?.com. doesn't (strictly speaking) exist.
Why? Ask John Klensin, who is, along with Faltstrom, the person most responsible for unusual additions to the Internet's domain name system. He is blunt about Haigh's Web address.
"The ?.com. domain shouldn't exist -- it has been prohibited all along," he said.
When told it clearly does exist, he is unremitting: "If [the Web address] resolves, it is probably another bug. Somehow it has been sneaked through."
Haphazard nature
In fact, when you type ?.com. into your browser you are in fact entering the ? sign's identifier, xn--9a. Your browser translates the ? sign as its identifier, goes to xn--9a.com and is then redirected to the more palatable poundsymbol.com.
How? Because "?" is just another identifier. For computers, ? is dealt with in exactly the same way as o. But since ? isn't a part of a language, it is one of the identifiers that has not made it through the process.
There is a good reason why, Klemsin explained.
"For some, `pound' means the hash symbol [#], for others it is the pound sterling symbol ?, and others refer to the hash/pound symbol as the `number sign.' It is a communications nightmare," he said.
But ?.com does exist, thanks to the haphazard way the Internet was created. If something takes off, it rapidly becomes part of the system; if it doesn't, it is left to wither on the vine. But no one is discourteous enough to remove the failed experiments on the way.
There is a long and often complex procedure that arrives at a set of standards, recognized officially, that ensures something will be accessible right across the Internet. After a very long, often difficult process, that standard for including the world's languages has now been put forward to the one organization that can formally enter it into the Internet -- the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), based in California.
ICANN has put out a formal request for comments as a final precaution. And once that process is finished, then everyone has to figure out how to actually make the standards work with the existing Internet infrastructure -- another daunting task already under way. The truly global Internet is on its way.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
RSS