Multilingual web address system approved

[Brian Warkoczeski]

Multilingual web address system approved

Oct 30, 2009

www.yahoo.com

SEOUL (AFP) - A global regulatory body Friday approved a new 
multilingual address system which it said would open up the Internet to 
millions more people worldwide.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) 
announced an end to the exclusive use of Latin characters for website 
addresses.

In future it will be possible to write an entire website address in any 
of the world's language scripts.

With the introduction of "internationalised" domain names (IDNs), 
scripts such as Chinese, Korean or Arabic will eventually be usable in 
the last part of an address name -- the part after the dot, as in .com 
and .org.

At present, technological restrictions mean all domain names end in 
letters from the Latin alphabet.

"This is only the first step but it is an incredibly big one and a 
historic move toward the internationalisation of the Internet," said Rod 
Beckstrom, ICANN's president and CEO, in a statement following a six-day 
conference in Seoul.

"We just made the Internet much more accessible to millions of people in 
regions such as Asia, the Middle East and Russia."

At first, IDNs will only be allowed on a limited basis involving country 
codes such as .kr for Korea. Eventually, their use will be hugely 
expanded to all types of Internet address names.

ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush said the introduction of IDNs 
follows years of work and study. "To see this finally start to unfold is 
to see the beginning of a historic change in the Internet and who uses it."

Beckstrom said the change signifies that the Internet belongs to 
everyone, no matter what language they speak.

"The Internet is about bringing the world together and this will 
facilitate that effort."

Thrush has described the new measure as the biggest technical change to 
the Internet for 40 years. It was approved a day after the 40th 
anniversary of the Internet's birth in a computer experiment by 
researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles.

ICANN says more than half the world's 1.6 billion Internet users use 
languages with scripts that are not Latin-based.

The first applications for IDNs will be accepted by November 16 and the 
first is expected to be operative by mid-2010.

ICANN, a non-profit body formed in 1998 by the US government, was last 
month given more autonomy after Washington relaxed its control over how 
the Internet is run.