The look of the Internet is about to change forever as non Latin Script web addresses have been approved by the Internet regulator.
At The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) Annual General Meeting in Seoul, they voted to allow the new domain names, the first of which we could see appearing as early as next year.
What this latest decision by Icann means is that in the very near future we will be seeing web addresses in other languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Russian and other scripts.
Icann was originally set up in 1998 by the US government in order to oversee and regulate the development of the Internet, however since October 1st the government have relinquished control and given Icann autonomy.
It does seem a bit unfair that more than half of the people using the internet don’t speak languages based on Latin script.
“Of the 1.6 billion internet users today worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not Latin-based,” said Icann president and CEO Rod Beckstrom.
“So this change is very much necessary for not only half the world’s internet users today but more than half, probably, of the future users as the internet continues to spread.”
“This is only the first step but it is an incredibly big one and a historic move toward the internationalisation of the Internet,” said Beckstrom in a statement.
“We just made the Internet much more accessible to millions of people in regions such as Asia, the Middle East and Russia.”
According to BBC Technology correspondent Mark Gregory, in the early days of the Internet most people who were using it spoke English and even those who didn’t usually wrote in Latin based languages but this is no longer the case.
However, to change all that and make the Internet a truly global service, it’s all about how the Domain Name System works. It needs to be able to recognise non Latin characters in International Domain Names and turn them into an IP addresses.
Icann have said that the “fantastically complicated technical feature” to make it all possible would represent “the biggest change” to the Internet in the forty years that the Internet has existed.
The first applications for the new International Domain Names are being accepted next month from the 16th November and will be implemented some time around “mid 2010”
If you want to find out all the latest news on tech why not subscribe to our RSS feed?
Hey thanks for the update! I’m actually a US dude over in China doing SEO for the US and Chinese market so this is incredibly pertinent! Thanks a bunch for the info I’ll have to start looking into buying Chinese domains… even though my Chinese sucks
. You can check out my seo/chinese biz blog for more about my life and learnings. I’ll pop a link back to you guys!