The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced an end to the exclusive use of Latin characters for website addresses.<\/p>\n
In future it will be possible to write an entire website address in any of the world’s language scripts.<\/p>\n
With the introduction of “internationalised” domain names (IDNs), scripts such as Chinese, Korean or Arabic will eventually be usable in the last part of an address name — the part after the dot, as in .com and .org.<\/p>\n
At present, technological restrictions mean all domain names end in letters from the Latin alphabet.<\/p>\n
“This is only the first step but it is an incredibly big one and a historic move toward the internationalisation of the Internet,” said Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s president and CEO, in a statement following a six-day conference in Seoul.<\/p>\n
“We just made the Internet much more accessible to millions of people in regions such as Asia, the Middle East and Russia.” At first, IDNs will only be allowed on a limited basis involving country codes such as .kr for Korea. Eventually, their use will be hugely expanded to all types of Internet address names.<\/p>\n
ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush said the introduction of IDNs follows years of work and study. “To see this finally start to unfold is to see the beginning of a historic change in the Internet and who uses it.” Beckstrom said the change signifies that the Internet belongs to everyone, no matter what language they speak.<\/p>\n
“The Internet is about bringing the world together and this will facilitate that effort.”<\/p>\n
Thrush has described the new measure as the biggest technical change to the Internet for 40 years. It was approved a day after the 40th anniversary of the Internet’s birth in a computer experiment by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
ICANN says more than half the world’s 1.6 billion Internet users use languages with scripts that are not Latin-based.<\/p>\n
The first applications for IDNs will be accepted by November 16 and the first is expected to be operative by mid-2010.<\/p>\n
ICANN, a non-profit body formed in 1998 by the US government, was last month given more autonomy after Washington relaxed its control over how the Internet is run.<\/p>\n