A new report from an industry-led group sponsored by the International Corporation for Assigned Names (ICANN) claims that poor handling of international characters in domain names is costing Web companies billions of dollars and is keeping 17 million people offline.
Back in 2011, ICANN dramatically expanded the number of top-level domains and began allowing domains with non-Latin characters. However, many Web applications and email clients recognize only ASCII characters in domain names. The report calls on developers to correct the flaw. “The problem here is that in some ways this is lazy programming, and because it’s lazy programming, it’s easy to replace it with better programming,” said Ram Mohan, who chaired the committee that wrote the report.
