Most dramatic internet shake-up to allow web addresses in scripts from Arabic to Japanese
30 Oct 2009
Source:Reuters
International domain names or addresses written in non-English characters have been approved today. It will spark one of the biggest changes to the internet in its four-decade history.
The Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN - the non-profit
group that oversees domain names - held a meeting this week in Seoul.
They announced today they will allow entire internet addresses to be in scripts that are not based on Latin letters.
A Chinese internet user browses for information on Google. Soon internet addresses will be available in Chinese script along with Arabic and Cyrillic
This 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 Cyrillic - in which Russian is written.
The change will address the fact more than half of the 1.6billion internet users worldwide use languages based on alphabets other than Latin.
'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.