Internet to allow non-Latin character domains
- Added:
- Oct 27, 2009
The Internet may soon host international domain names that can be written in non-Latin characters, such as Arabic, Russian and Chinese, making the medium more accessible to billions of people around the world.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the non-profit group that oversees domain names, is holding a meeting this week in Seoul.
The meeting will look into allowing Internet addresses to be in scripts that are not based on Latin letters.
This would include characters as diverse as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic (Russian). Of the 1.6 billion Internet users worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts based on alphabets other than Latin.
Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's new president and CEO, said that if the change is approved, ICANN would begin accepting applications for non-English domain names and that the first entries into the system would likely come sometime in mid 2010.
Enabling the change, Thrush said, is the creation of a translation system that allows multiple scripts to be converted to the right address.
"We're confident that it works because we've been testing it now for a couple of years," he said. "And so we're really ready to start rolling it out."
"So this change is very much necessary for not only half the world's Internet users today, but more than half of probably the future users as the use of the Internet continues to spread," he said.
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