Dear all, As continuing effort to revive the earlier discussion thread with the title "Information wants to be ASCII or Unicode?", allow me to point out the current news event on a further step towards internationalized domain names, as summarised by boingboing blogger Xeni Jardin on Rachel Maddow Show as below: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/10/30/xeni-on-rachel-maddo-2.html "[D]omain name extensions will be available in non-Latin character sets. Chinese, Greek, Arabic, or any one of the more than 20 official languages in India. In other words, the alphabet you're reading this blog post in will no longer be the default for web addresses." Not long ago, PHP a popular open-source computer scripting language that powers many websites also announced their latest version with the feature of "internationalization capabilities via Unicode support" http://www.thestandard.com/news/2009/10/21/php-6-boost-internationalization-... Still, whether the open-source developers will write computer codes that are "unicode safe" remains a challenge, as the PHP creator has been quoted saying: "... unicode is a big problem we need to solve. Developers want to work on cool, sexy code tho - features people will notice, they don't want ot make extensions unicode safe..." http://www.nowpublic.com/tech-biz/rasmus-lerdorf-simple-hard-drupalcon-2008-... Will the default culture of Internet shift from ASCII to Unicode? What is the implications for the future of Internet? The beginning of the end of Anglo-Latin order? The beginning of the end of commonly shared English-based Internet-specific languages? When we reintroduce languages back, have we also reintroduced more state power back? I particularly found the question raised by Rebecca MacKinnon <http://rconversation.blogs.com/> interesting: "What if a human rights group in Canada wants to register a domain name in Chinese or Arabic, in the native-alphabet country extensions for China or Saudi Arabia," she said, "Can the countries involved deny that request? Those are the sort of challenges to free speech that lie ahead." (quoted by Xeni Jardin <http://www.boingboing.net/2009/10/30/xeni-on-rachel-maddo-2.html>).