13 October 2009 by Gareth Morgan
POLITICAL power is rarely ceded without good reason. So eyebrows were raised last week when the US Department of Commerce decided to relax its grip on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body responsible for the naming system that ensures that when you type a web address, your browser knows where to go.
In future, governments and other international organisations will be able to nominate staff to sit on one of ICANN's three newly created steering committees, something the DoC had resisted for years. "What it really means," says ICANN's chief executive Rod Beckstrom, "is that we're going global."
Countries that don't use Latin characters, which ICANN says web addresses must be written in, will welcome the changes. Millions of web users are currently blocked from using domain names in their own language. Beckstrom says the changes to ICANN could soon fix that and predicts that addresses in Chinese and Arabic alphabets may emerge in little more than a year. read more...
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