Mr Dmitry “Vladimir Putin” Medvedev the recently appointed Prime Minister of Russia is promoting the idea of Cyrillic domain names to be implemented on the Internet. Although Cyrillic is currently part of the IDN roll out by ICANN, it does brings international attention to the fact that the Internet is a predominantly English based system that has no consideration to non English languages.
Currently all domains are in Latin script. Russian sites carry the extension “.ru”, but the Kremlin wants Cyrillic addresses to carry the extension “.rf”, for Russian Federation. But in Cyrillic script, said Mr Medvedev.
Again, another fundamental issue for multi cultural/lingual nations is the fact that we are all categorised into a domain name naming system based on an UN list which has no consideration what so ever for multi cultural/multilingual countries.
In Aotearoa/New Zealand the Maori Internet Society proposed to the .nz governing body (the DNC) for .nz to have a similar scheme but that of a bi-lingual system. The only response was that it was not part of their policy. This myopic thinking is rampant with the worlds Internet governing bodies and an issue that is not a priority for many countries yet.
It will become an issue soon and ICANN should begin considering this issue now as there are several countries that i am aware of whom have the same issue.
I would like to see ICANN conduct a public consultation with the governments of all countries that have a TLD, to ascertain if the country requires an alternative TLD to adequately represent its citizens as well as which script the name should be in.
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