{tech}.Ben Buckman.net

The NYT has a story today on Russia's push toward internet domains with non-Latin characters. It's a controversial move. Advocates say the current system is biased toward English-speaking countries and poses a barrier to people around the world from getting online. Critics say it'll create ethnic/linguistic "cyber ghettos" and lead to [Russian] government censorship.

I wouldn't easily be able to type a Cyrillic domain name. But sites can easily have multiple domains pointing to them, one in the native language and one transliterated. So if a Russian sites wants to market to non-Russian speakers, it can invest $10/year and a few lines of server code for a transliterated domain.

And really, do I go to Russian sites now? I couldn't read them if I did. And if I really need to read something on a non-English site, chances are I would have the URL from somewhere else (like a search query), so I could paste it into Google Translate. (I did wonder about the encoding issues around this, but I assume ICANN (which manages the domain system) has worked that out in the protocol.

Replace "cyber" in "cyberghetto" with any form of communication - books, newspapers, talking, poetry - and it becomes no different. Languages can divide people, the internet is no different. Translation tools can bridge the gap - Google Wave promises to have that functionality at some point - but domains don't change anything fundamental.

I used to visit Hebrew sites with transliterated domain names, and they could look pretty funny sometimes. So I think this is a good move, so long as most sites with a potentially global audience have a secondary Latin domain as a backup.