Pardon my Cyrillic
"In Seoul, we plan to move forward to the next step in the internationalization of the Internet, which means that eventually people from every corner of the globe will be able to navigate much of the online world using their native language scripts," he said.
Russian and Chinese politicians have been making the issue a top priority in the past year, as has India, which has been busy laying fibre optic cables down in around 6000 villages. ICANN has previously said that about 150 million people in India speak English, but close to a billion others don't feel comfortable with it as a first language and would rather be able to surf the web in their own language.
The problem with that, however, is that it all gets just a little bit complicated with 22 official languages and 11 different scripts.
In Seoul, ICANN is also dedicating discussion time to Generic top-level Domains (gTLDs), like ".com" or ".org" which aren't associated with any specific country. ICANN says it's now developing a new programme to expand the number of gTLDs from its current list of 21 to include almost any word, in almost any language.
