ICANN, the private body in charge of overseeing the foundations of the Internet has voted in favor of allowing characters other than the Roman alphabet for websites, including traditional and simplified Chinese characters, Russian Cyrillic, Korean Hangul and Hebrew among 16 alphabets.
For the time being however, the changes will only be limited to domains run by national governments such as .us or .uk.
ICANN’s vote came after six years of discussions into the matter. The group says that about 40 percent of all websites are controlled by national governments with the other 60 percent being “top level” domains such as .net, .com and .org.
“This is only the first step, but it is an incredibly big one and an historic move toward the internationalization of the Internet,” said Rod Beckstrom, CEO of ICANN.
Result for: russia
In June, the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) began investigating whether Microsoft’s decision to slow sales of XP in favor of Vista was a violation of competition laws.
This week, regulators have dropped the investigation, allowing Microsoft to freely continue selling their products as they please.
Other parts of the investigation included why some retailers paid a different price for XP or Vista then other retailers.
Russian users who want to still use XP, Microsoft will begin exchange programs for Vista to XP, from this week until the end of 2009.
Result for: russia
According to a Washington Post report, Nokia is preparing to launch an “App Store” at the upcoming Mobile World Congress
Eldar Murtazin, editor of Mobile-review.com, broke the story but the blog is in Russian so here is the translation of what was said:
“At first glance, for now, the app portal looks so so, there is some confusion. But they are trying, polishing it and a lot has changed for the better in a matter of days. A right step in a right direction? And the distribution and revenue sharing model between app makers and Nokia looks very attractive.”
Muzartin is known for having insider connections in the mobile industry but for now the rumor remains a rumor but we will keep you updated.
