FINALLY, EQUALITY ON THE INTERNET

       More than half of the world's 1.67 billion Internet surfers will find their life online getting a little easier soon, because they will no longer need to use English or any other Latin script to find Web pages. Users will be able to find sites by typing or searching for Web addresses in their own script such as Chinese, Japanese, Arabic or Korean.
       Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, decided last week to support full addresses in non-Latin characters. Countries can apply to register tehse internationalised domain names from November 16. Other top-level names, including those ending in.com,.net and so on, will similarly be available in the coming years.
       The faster-growing non-Latin user community can no longer be neglected. Beyond the ease of use and convenience, benefits will include at least symbolic equality on the Net. For them it promises a world of difference. For Latin surfers, however, not much will change. They will not, in any case, type non-Latin addresses to access content in languages they do not comprehend.
       Cyberspace, nevertheless, is as dynamic as it is unpredictable. The social, cultural and commercial ramifications of what Icann called "the biggest technical change" in Internet history will become obvious only in the long term, if not in hindsight.
       An immediate consequence is that it will promote communication among, and therefore attract more, non-Latin users. Sheer numbers are what are often needed to drive Internet innovations. Take Google for instance, it gets a cut every time a user clicks on advertising appearing alongside results from searches they make through the billions of Web pages it indexes.
       Chinese domain names might enable Chinese to overtake English. If so, they will help the virtual economic epicentre to move eastward, the same direction that the real economy is going in the current global realignment. The Chinese market will be hard to ignore online as well as off-line. Singapore is favourably placed linguistically to compete. Singaporean enterprises should not neglect building Chinese e-commerce sites if they want to communicate with and sell to that market. For added customer convenience, they should also adopt Chinese Web addresses.