International addresses
ICAAN is expected to approve international domain names can be
written in languages other than English.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or
ICANN - the non-profit group that oversees domain names - is holding
a meeting this week in Seoul. Domain names are the monikers behind
every website, email address and Twitter post, such as
".com" and other suffixes.
The move will mean that for first time entire internet
addresses to be in scripts that are not based on Latin letters. That
could open up the web to more people around the world as addresses could be
in Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic.
Not one for over statement
Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board, told reporters that this was the biggest change
technically to the internet since it was invented 40 years ago. Obviously forgetting the invention of the WWW.
Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's new president and CEO, said that if
the change is approved, ICANN would begin accepting applications for
non-English domain names and that the first entries into the system
would likely come sometime in mid 2010.