Dr Tan Tin Wee, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS), has been honoured as a “Global Connector” in the Internet Society’s inaugural batch of Internet Hall of Fame inductees for his instrumental role in the internationalisation of the Internet.

Tan’s list of achievements and awards over the course of his professional life is a long one. He has been working with the Internet since the 1980s when he was training as a biochemist and molecular biologist in Cambridge and Edinburgh.

One of Tan’s key contributions was support for the Chinese and Tamil languages on the Web. …

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has approved a program to expand the Internet address system’s top level domains (TLD) beyond the familiar suffixes such as .com and .net.

Under a new TLD program, companies, entrepreneurs and communities can apply and run their own TLDs that incorporate their company names, trademarks and location names.

As an example, Sony could switch from Sony.com to .Sony, while cities such as Bangkok could have a domain name such .bangkok. The new domain names will also support languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Arabic. …