Uh, Am I the Only Person Who Thinks This Isn't a Hot Idea?

Any post that begins with a disclaimer can't be kosher, but here goes: I am not a racist. Now, having said that, and with nothing to back up the statement, let's get down to the brass tacks.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the governing body of IP addresses and domain names, has announced it is ready to implement web addresses utilizing non-roman characters. In other words, if you want an address using Farsi, Chinese, Cyrillic, etc. then hooray, now you can. ICANN argues that since half the world's internet users speak and read languages that aren't roman character-based it makes sense, but I have to wonder if it was ever a problem that needed fixing. During my entire cumulative three years in Japan I never once heard anybody complain or express confusion at roman character URLs. Of course, that was only one country, but I believe virtually anybody with the resources and savvy to really utilize the internet at least know the roman alphabet enough to enter an address. Again, I can't really say for sure and the article doesn't explicitly say or link to any info on just how squeaky this wheel really is.

I don't think this is a particularly good idea. With this change I believe the internet will begin to fragment along ethnic lines and effectively lock out massive segments of the web to anybody without the foreign language input plug-ins to access sites of a specific address language. If, for some reason, you think it's no big deal to switch to another language input (using the language bar you probably don't have activated) I suggest checking the international settings in your control panel. There are a hell of a lot of foreign input types. This move will expand the internet by creating mirrors using separate foreign language addresses, and these alternate versions of the Unicode address pages may even contain different info. But you'll never know.

Welcome to the age of internet ghettos.

--Matt