Web URLs In Non Latin Languages Coming

Web URLs are set to undergo one of the biggest changes since its founding four-decade ago. ICANN announced that it is considering international domain names written in non-Latin script.

That could potentially open up the web to more people around the world as addresses could be in characters as diverse as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Russian.

“This is the biggest change technically to the internet since it was invented 40 years ago,” Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board, said, calling it a “fantastically complicated technical feature”. He said he expects the board to grant approval on Friday.

Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s new president and CEO, said that if the change is approved, ICANN would begin accepting applications for non-Latin domain names and that the first entries into the system would likely come sometime in mid 2010.

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Source: webguild.org