The Internet’s governing body has backed plans to allow non-English characters to be used in Web site addresses. The move has the potential to increase Internet use dramatically around the world.

Until now, all domain names were limited to the 26 characters of the Latin (i.e. English) alphabet plus the numbers 0-9 and the hyphen. While that was fine for English speakers, as well as many European languages, it was a significant restriction for people speaking language such as Chinese or Arabic.

There are already technical workaround which allow the main part of the domain name to be written in different alphabets, but the system operated by Internet Corporation For Assigned Names And Number did not allow this to work with the suffixes, such as .com or .co.uk.

ICANN chief Rod Beckstrom argued in favor of the changes by noting that international Web use has grown to the point that the majority of net users speak a language which doesn’t use the Latin alphabet.

The changes won’t be a free-for-all as that would be unworkable. Instead the internet regulator in any particular country can apply to have its national language’s alphabet recognized. Once this happens it will be allowed to offer local domain names (such as .cn for China) in that alphabet.

Addresses ending in .com will remain Latin-character only and ICANN has decided against extending the range of characters allowed to include punctuation marks other than the icon. So www.blorgeisawesome!.com may have to wait a while.

As ICANN expects some teething troubles with the early implementation of the plan, it’s going to approve languages gradually, meaning there may be a waiting list. There will be a $26,000 fee for ICANN to consider a language as well as a possible fee of between one and three percent of the country’s registry’s revenues. ICANN will begin accepting applications from 16 November and expects the first addresses to be operational by next summer.

ICANN noted that some internet applications will need to be rewritten to be able to deal with the new addresses. It believes most major browsers should be unaffected but some e-mail programs could have problems.

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Entry was posted on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 9:46 am under Internet.

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