Shake-up for internet domain names

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Internet addresses using scripts such as Hebrew, Hindi and Korean will be available by mid-2010 after their use was 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.

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, a not-for-profit corporation which oversees internet addresses, said: "The coming introduction of non-Latin characters represents the biggest technical change to the internet since it was created four decades ago.

"Right now, internet address endings are limited to Latin characters - A to Z. But the fast track process is the first step in bringing the 100,000 characters of the languages of the world online for domain names."

Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's president and chief executive, added: "This is only the first step but it is an incredibly big one and a historic move toward the internationalisation of the internet.

"The first countries that participate will not only be providing valuable information of the operation of IDNs in the domain name system, they are also going to help to bring the first of billions more people online - people who never use Roman characters in their daily lives."

Mr Beckstrom said engineers around the world had been working on the technical issues surrounding the introduction of IDNs for more than nine years and the systems had been tested over the last 18 months.