According to a study sponsored by Icann, the organisation that maintains the list of valid internet domain names, a bug that makes systems incompatible with domain names that include non-Latin characters is keeping a large proportion of the worlds population offline. Many Web applications or e-mail clients recognize top-level domains as valid only if they are composed of characters that can be encoded using American Standard Code for Information Interchange, or ASCII. The study, which was carried out in partnership between the University of Oxford and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, found that more than half of all domains are not working properly on some form of Adjusting the software to accept the universal character set Unicode would help open up the internet to about one billion people who speak and write only in their local languages.
According to a study sponsored by Icann, the organisation that maintains the list of valid internet domain names, a bug that makes systems incompatible with domain names that include non-Latin characters is keeping a large proportion of the worlds population offline. The study, which was carried out in partnership between the University of Oxford and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, found that more than half of all domains are not working properly on some form of Adjusting the software to accept the universal character set Unicode would help open up the internet to about one billion people who speak and write only in their local languages.