ICANN plans to delay expansion of domain name characters
20 July 2005
The head of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has revealed that concerns about phishing scams may delay the expansion of domain names to non-English characters.
ICANN boss Vint Cerf said that internet engineers must now spend time "trying to winnow down, frankly, the number of character (sets) that are allowed to be registered" in order to reduce the number of scams carried out online.
Phishing scams attempt to trick web users into divulging confidential personal or financial information, often by micking the websites of legitimate companies. They are a growing problem on the internet and companies and organisations across the globe are working on ways to tackle them.
The internet's domain name system, which is overseen by ICANN, currently supports just 37 characters - the letters of the Latin alphabet, 10 numerals and a hyphen. However, web experts have developed character systems that recognise other languages, such as Arabic, Chinese and Japanese, Wired.com reports.
Security companies have warned that some characters can appear almost identical, but have two separate codes in character systems such as Unicode. This enables scammers to register a domain name that appears to be a legitimate site such as Paypal.
Demand for non-English domain names is high outside the United States and a UN panel looking into internet governance recently stated that "insufficient progress has been mad toward multilingualization" of the internet.
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