英国新闻听力 互联网域名变革（在线收听）

The internet is often described as the World Wide Web but how truly global is it when millions of users have no choice but to use a Latin-based alphabet to name websites and email addresses?

All of that is set to change following the decision taken by the internet regulator organisation to allow domain names to be in non-Latin scripts.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) announced the historic change at its board meeting in Seoul, Korea this week.

The new naming system means that websites will no longer have to include suffixes such as .com, .co.uk or .cn written in English.

Instead complete web addresses will be possible in languages such as Chinese, Arabic or Korean for the first time.

These new Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) will come online next year, and may prove very popular since more than half of the 1.6 billion people who use the internet speak languages that do not use the alphabet.

The president of Icann, Rod Beckstrom, said that the new IDNs would represent the "biggest change" to the coding behind the internet since it was invented forty years ago.

He also said the move was necessary and the morally correct thing to do.

"Not only is it an issue of convenience, but it's an issue of what's right, the right to express their names in their own cultural language," said Mr Beckstrom.

The change to the naming system is not without its critics however.

Some have said that the new approach could lead to the ghettoisation of the internet with some online communities operating only within their languages, isolated from the rest of the web.

Others have claimed that it will make protection of intellectual property rights even harder than it already is.

英特网通常被叫做环球网或万维网，但是，数百万互联网用户别无选择，只能使用拉丁字母来命名网站和电子邮件地址，那么，互联网的全球化程度又有多高呢？

互联网管理机构决定域名可以用非拉丁文描述之后，这一切都将发生改变。

互联网名称与数字地址分配机构(ICANN) 本周在韩国首尔举行的委员会议上宣布了这个历史性的变革。

新的命名体系意味着网址后面不再一定包含用英文书写的.com,.co,.uk或.cn等后缀。

相反，完整的网址可能首次可以用中文，阿拉伯语或韩语来表示。

新的国际化域名IDNs将于明年付诸使用，而且肯定会非常受欢迎。因为互联网的160亿用户中超过半数所使用的语言不使用字母表。

ICANN主席Rod Beckstrom表示，新的国际化域名将代表互联网编码发明40年来最大的变革。

他还表示，此举是必要的，从道义上讲也是正确的。

“这不仅仅是方便的问题，而是权利的问题。他们有权用自己的文化语言来表达自己的名字。”

然而，命名系统的变革仍然没有避免批评。

一些人表示，这种新的方法会导致互联网的孤立性，一些网络社区仅用自己的语言开办，从网络的其他部分孤立出来。

其他人则声称，这将使知识产权的保护比现在更加困难。