A new way of writing internet addresses has been approved

Oct.31.2009 Domains

A new way of writing internet addresses has been approved, described as the net’s “biggest technical change” since it was created 40 years ago.

Non-Latin characters are to be used in future

The organisation that oversees them has backed the use of non-Latin characters from languages like Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Hindi and Korean.

Up to now, addresses have been limited to the 26 characters in the Latin alphabet used in English (A-Z) as well as 10 numbers and the hyphen.

That has meant internet users with little or no knowledge of English may still have to type in Latin characters to access their country’s web pages.

But now, web addresses using characters from different languages will be available by mid-2010, including TLDs (top-level domains such as “.com”)

Their use has been approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) board at a meeting in Seoul, South Korea.

Nations and territories will be able to apply for internet address endings reflecting their name and using their national language from November 16, when ICANN’s Internationalised Domain Name (IDN) fast track process begins.

Major shake-up of web addresses planned

If the applications meet certain criteria, including government and community support and a stability evaluation, the applicants will be approved to start accepting registrations for domain names.

More than half the world’s internet users do not use English or a Latin-based language as their first language and this move will see around 100,000 new characters available for use in IDNs.

Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of ICANN, said: “The coming introduction of non-Latin characters represents the biggest technical change to the internet since it was created four decades ago.”

Here at Insta Host we believe that a review after the first wave of applicants will give an early indication of how this change may change the evolution of the Internet, giving a glimpse of the type of TLDs which may come into use.  Whilst it may seem sound business strategy for a company to run or register a domain TLD such as “.host” the real question is whether the public will trust and use the new domains – this will be the true indicator of how “exciting” this change may be!.

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