According to a study sponsored by Google , 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 apps and email servers only accept domain names if they are coded in ASCII , which does n't include non - Latin characters . Adjusting the system 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. Many web apps and email servers only recognise domain names if they are coded in ASCII, which doesn't include non-Latin characters. 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.