Nominet launches international domains consultation
22 June 2005
Nominet's Policy Advisory Board (PAB) has unveiled a public consultation over plans to adopt international domain names (IDN).
Nominet houses website addresses ending in .uk and the organisation is now looking to reflect the UK's multi-cultural mix by expanding to include addresses using native languages and featuring accents and foreign alphabets.
The domain name regulator suggests that the expansion plans would improve the current system and bring an end to addresses being forced to use the 26-letter Latin alphabet with hyphens and digits 0 to 9.
The PAB is a group of representatives of the UK internet community, including government, industry and others which advises Nominet's board on the policy direction the registry should take. The board has set up a working group on Internationalised Domain Names.
The current Nominet system allows users to read text from languages across the world, but domestic URLs do not yet include the characters and features of foreign languages.
The three-month consultation period will assess the level of demand from web users and communities to set up an address in their own language that ends in a .uk suffix. Nominet believes that the change can be achieved without overhaul of the internet or heavy investment.
"We are asking everyone in the UK what they want," said Edward Philips, Nominet's head of regulation. "We have Welsh and Gaelic, which require some additional characters, but when you start looking across the country you realise there is a huge range of languages spoken here. Should we open it up to absolutely everybody?"
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