UNESCO and ICANN sign agreement to promote linguistic diversity on internet
A major step was taken on 10th December 2009 towards greater diversity on internet when UNESCO signed an Agreement with ICANN.
This agreement follows the decison by the Internet Corporation for Assigned names and Numbers to introduce IDN’s Domain names. Till date domain name in internet address e.g. .com, .net, and .org were written using characters from the Latin alphabets. On November 16, in the first stage of the plan, ICANN began accepting requests from peoples of countries and other regions around the world for new country codes in Arabic, Chinese etc….
Irina Bokova, Director General of UNESCO, welcomed ICANN;s move to introduce the IDN’s. According to her: This is the development that UNESCO has long been waiting. Internet must be trudly diverse so that all language groups combine its unique potential. She said: With this new agreement UNESCO and ICANN will work together to bring more people into the IT network.
Rod Beckstrom, the president of ICANN agreed that this is the important change to the global internet community. 50% of the internet users don;t use a latin bases script as their native language. IDN’s are about to make it more easier to the regional languages.