ICANN approves non-Latin characters for domain names

by Brad Linder on October 30, 2009 at 04:00 PM

Cyrillic URL
As expected, the international agency that regulates internet domain names has approved a new rule that allows URLs to be written using non-Latin characters. In other words, native speakers of Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Hindi, and other languages will be able to spell out web addresses using their oown alphabets.

Roughly 1.6 billion internet users speak languages that don't use Latin characters. That's half of the people that usee the internet.

Officials describe the move as the "biggest technical change to the Internet since it was created four decades ago." Nations and territories will be able to apply for internet extensions reflecting their regions starting on November 16th. We'll probably start seeing Internationalized Domain Names starting in mid-2010.

[via TechCrunch]

Tags: domain-name, domain-names, icann, news, url, web-address, web-addresses