Internet addresses will soon feature non-Latin characters in a major technical development.

Internet addresses could soon feature non-Latin characters after the approval of the new Internationalised Domain Name Fast Track Process by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers board (ICANN).

The first internet addresses containing non-Latin characters from start to finish will soon be online – a major technical change since the web’s creation forty years ago.

It will allow nations and territories to apply for internet extensions reflecting their name, made up of characters from their national language.

From 16 November, applications will be accepted for domain names in any language – spelling the end to the use of purely Latin characters from A to Z. They must meet criteria that include government and community support and a stability evaluation.

ICANN, a non-profit regulatory body originally founded by the US government in 1998, is responsible for the global coordination of the internet’s system of unique identifiers like domain names and the addresses used in a variety of internet protocols.

ICANN Chairman, Peter Dengate Thrush, said: “The coming introduction of non-Latin characters represents the biggest technical change to the internet since it was created four decades ago…the Fast Track Process is the first step in bringing the 100,000 characters of the languages of the world online for domain names.”

“This is only the first step, but it is an incredibly big one and an historic move toward the internationalisation of the internet,” said Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s President and CEO. “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.”

An Internationalised Domain Name (IDN) is an internet domain name that may contain labels scripted in language-specific alphabets, such as Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Hebrew, and many others. These names contain one or more non-ASCII characters (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) that may be letters with diacritics or entirely different non-Latin scripts.

Tina Dam, ICANN’s Senior Director for IDNs, commented: “Our work on IDNs has gone through numerous drafts, dozens of tests, and an incredible amount of development by volunteers since we started this project.

“The launch of the Fast Track Process will be an amazing change to make the Internet an even more valuable tool, and for even more people around the globe.”

It is likely the majority of early non-Latin internet addresses to be approved will be in Chinese and Arabic script, followed by Russian.

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