Non-Latin Domain Names Approved by ICANN

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organization overseeing Internet addresses today approved usage of Hindi, Hebrew, Korean and other non-Latin characters in domain names, clearing the way for the web to become truly worldwide. Governments and designees could begin to submit requests for names as soon as Nov. 16, and they could be in use by early next year, mostly likely staring with Arabic, Chinese and other high demand scripts.

"This represents one small step for ICANN, but one big step for half of mankind who use non-Latin scripts, such as those in Korea, China and the Arabic speaking world as well as across Asia, Africa, and the rest of the world," said Rod Beckstrom, ICANN CEO.

Domain names, the basic Internet addresses that end in ".com" and other so-called top level domain extensions, have until now been limited to the 26 letters of the English alphabet and 10 numerals plus hyphens. Internet users such as those in Asia or the Middle East not otherwise familiar with Latin characters still have to type them in to browser bars, even just to access Web pages written in their native scripts, such as Chinese or Arabic. It is true that search engines can alleviate the difficulties, but companies and organizations still are forced to use Latin characters on business letters, cards, billboards and advertisements.

It is estimated that 1.5 billion people use the Internet, and many use languages such as Tagalog, Japanese, Thai, Arabic and Chinese, which have writing systems completely different from English. It is not clear yet whether existing owners of .com and other current extensions would have first claim on the new extension endings for their domain names. Will Amazon, for instance, get first crack at Amazon.whateverthechinesecharacterforcomis? This will be the real battle and could take quite some time to sort out.