U.N. delegates: English isn't good enough

ATHENS, Greece--When the pioneering engineers who invented the Internet began crafting the modern domain name system, they came up with a rule that was reasonable at the time: Domains must use only English-language characters.

A November 1983 specification proposed that domain names would have "only letters, digits and hyphen"--which meant that Cyrillic, Arabic, kanji or Chinese letters and characters could not be used in domains. Not even diacritical marks employed in German, French and Spanish were permitted.

On Wednesday, delegates to a United Nations summit here complained that the ASCII-only choice was representative of an Internet culture that is far too English-centric and that fails to respect other languages.
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