Multilingual DNS and Access to Local Culture and Language

  • Park Y
N/ACitations
Citations of this article
5Readers
Mendeley users who have this article in their library.

Abstract

The global Internet as of today recognizes only ASCII addresses as domain names. But we are in a transition to Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs). This transition has evolved into a series of political challenges such as creating IDNs associated with Country Code Top Level Domain Names (ccTLDs), developing policies on IDN dispute resolution, IDN whois records, and competition among incumbent registries. Who sets the standards? How many IDNs should be allocated for each country? Should incumbent registries get the same top level domain (TLD) in new scripts? This project explores how to resolve such political challenges. The concept of multilingual road signs on the global Internet was first proposed to ICANN in 2000. ICANN is about to implement the IDNs. Why did it take so long to reach a global consensus on multilingual domain names? Those who believe in the principle of global compatibility of the Internet were afraid that the Internet would become a tower of Babel. They resisted multilingual gateways to protect global compatibility on the Internet. Those who believe in the principle of access to local culture and language on the Internet kept fighting to build multilingual gateways. Tensions also arise among those who use same language and character sets when it comes to a decision-making process for the specific language and character sets. The Government of China believes it has a sole authority to decide matters about Chinese gateways on the global Internet, whilst stakeholders of Chinese are all around the world. India has another challenge. The Government of India recognizes 23 official languages including Hindi and English. Everybody struggles at this stage how to handle this complicated challenge ahead. Research Objective This study will focus on the role of Brazil, Russia, India and China in building a multilingual global Internet. It investigates how two competing international principles - the principle of global compatibility and the principle of reflecting local culture and language on the Internet - have shaped the standards and implementation of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs). Its basic research question is: What international mechanism can resolve the conflicts between the competing principles in developing technologies of Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) on the global Internet? Methodology Case study on Brazil, Russia, India, China (BRIC) and the US will be conducted. Yin (1994) identified the following six primary sources of evidence for case study research: documentation, archival records, interviews, direct observation, participant observation, and physical artifacts.This study employs the following data collection: (1) documentations produced by ICANN, ITU, MINC, UNESCO on IDNs, (2) archival records maintained by ICANN and MINC on IDNs, (3) interviews with ccTLD managers and government representatives of Brazil, Russia, India, China and United States and experts in IDNs (4) participant observation at ICANN and IGF.

Cite

CITATION STYLE

APA

Park, Y. (2008). Multilingual DNS and Access to Local Culture and Language. In 1st International Giganet Workshop.

Register to see more suggestions

Mendeley helps you to discover research relevant for your work.

Already have an account?

Save time finding and organizing research with Mendeley

Sign up for free