The first applications were accepted on Monday for internationalised domain names (IDNs), in one of the most significant steps to making the Internet more accessible around the globe.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has opened the application process, ending the exclusive use of Latin characters for website addresses.
On the first day, “we have already received six applications from around the world for three different scripts,” ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom told an Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Egypt’s Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
He said that while ICANN could not reveal the names of those applying, Egypt – with .misr, meaning Egypt in Arabic – and Russia had already made public their applications for country code top level domains in their scripts.
With the introduction of “internationalised” domain names (IDNs), scripts such as Chinese, Korean or Arabic will eventually be usable in the last part of an address name – the part after the dot, as in .com and .org.
“It’s an historic moment,” Beckstrom said.
Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/internet-inches-closer-to-internationalisation-1821930.html
Posted: Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 7:37 pm
Tags: International
Filed Under: International | Comments Off
After months of often bitter debate, European Union lawmakers reached agreement on how to preserve citizen’s rights to Internet access in a meeting that ended in the early hours of Thursday morning.
The issue, which pits citizens’ civil liberties against the rights of content owners such as record and movie companies to protect creative works on the Internet, has blocked the passage of a wide range of laws collectively dubbed the telecoms package.
Although the compromise reached by representatives of the European Parliament, the 27 national governments and the European Commission has still to be confirmed, it is seen as a watershed moment for the proposed laws, which aim to enhance competition among telecoms providers and to adapt users’ rights to better suit the Internet age.
The text of the telecoms package now contains a new Internet freedom provision that states that access to the Internet is a human right of every E.U. citizen, and that if authorities take away that right people must have the opportunity to defend themselves; citizens also have an automatic right to mount a legal challenge.
Read More: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/181472/eu_breaks_deadlock_in_debate_over_right_to_internet_access.html
Posted: Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 7:36 pm
Tags: Censorhsip
Filed Under: International | Comments Off