14 DAY TRIAL // Unsurprisingly, ICANN has approved the plan to introduce support for domain names in non-Latin characters. The move is billed as the biggest change to how the Internet works since its inception forty years ago but it is far from a done deal yet. The support will be rolled out in several stages and if everything goes to plan, ICANN believes it will make a big difference to users in Asia, the Middle East and other regions that use a non-Latin alphabet.
"The coming introduction of non-Latin characters represents the biggest technical change to the Internet since it was created four decades ago," ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush, said. "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."
The plan has been in the works for years and the process has not been a straightforward one. Now, ICANN is finally ready to move forward with the plans, perhaps made even easier as the organization has cut loose some of its ties to the US government. The first step will begin on November 16 and will involve just the country code top level domain sufixes, the '.de', '.jp' at the end of local web addresses.
This will enable countries to apply for a ccTLD suffix written in their native script. ICANN will review these applications and provided they have the support of the local government and community, it will allow local registrars to issue addresses with the new suffix. The first such addresses should be live by the middle of next year. Eventually, websites will be able to register entire domain names written in their local language and finally .com and .net addresses will be available in these languages as well.
"This is only the first step, but it is an incredibly big one and an historic move toward the internationalization of the Internet ," Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's President and CEO, said. "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."