miji.beInternet URLs were designed on the assumption of English (more precisely, ASCII characters). A URL like `https://www.example.com/about` is natural for English speakers, but for the billions of people whose native language is Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, or Hindi, it is a string of foreign characters. Can URLs get past the language barrier?
In 2003, the specification for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) was formally established, making it possible to use characters other than ASCII in domain names. Domains such as "nihongo.jp" written in Japanese script, "zhongwen.cn" written in Chinese characters, and "مثال.مصر" in Arabic became technically possible. In Japan, registration of Japanese-language domains under the ".jp" domain began in 2001. However, the adoption rate of Japanese-language domains remains low. Even in the registration counts for `.jp` domains published by JPRS, Japanese-language domains account for only a part of the total.
There are several reasons why Japanese-language domains have not caught on. The first is the effort of typing. To type a Japanese-language domain into a browser's address bar, you have to switch to Japanese input mode, type kanji or hiragana, and convert them. While an English domain can be typed directly in half-width alphanumeric characters, a Japanese-language domain takes more input steps. The second is the problem of Punycode conversion. The Japanese-language domain "tatoe.jp" written in Japanese characters is converted internally into the Punycode "xn--r8jz45g.jp". In email addresses and some applications, this Punycode ends up being displayed, becoming a meaningless string for users.
In the Arabic-speaking world, the language problem of URLs has another difficulty as well. Arabic is a language written from right to left (RTL: Right-to-Left), which is the opposite direction to the left-to-right order of URLs. When a URL containing an Arabic domain name is embedded in Arabic text, the directions of the characters are mixed, and the display can break. This problem is called the "BiDi (Bidirectional) problem," and although it is also handled in the Unicode specification, cases where the display breaks still remain.
Short URLs play a surprising role on the multilingual internet. Because a short URL is a short, language-independent string of alphanumeric characters, it is easy to type and easy to share regardless of language. If you convert a long URL with a Japanese-language domain into `bit.ly/xxxxx`, you can reduce the effort of typing. While internationalized domain names were created for multilingual support, there are also situations where English-based short URLs are used as a tool for getting past the language barrier. The language problem of URLs is a challenge not yet solved, lying between the historical fact that the internet was born in the English-speaking world and the reality that people all over the world use the internet.