Internet to have non-English domain names

Seoul: In its four-decade history, the Internet is set to undergo a biggest change with the expected approval this week that the international domain names or addresses can be written in languages other than English. Domain names are the monikers behind every website, e-mail address and Twitter post, such as ".com" and other suffixes.

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"This is the biggest change technically to the Internet since it was invented 40 years ago," said Peter Dengate Thrush, Chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Board, calling it a 'fantastically complicated technical feature.' ICANN, the non-profit group that oversees domain names is holding a meeting this week in Seoul. It is expected that the board would grant approval on Friday, which is the conference's final day.

One of the key issues to be taken up by ICANN's board is whether to allow for the first time the entire Internet addresses to be in scripts that are not based on Latin letters. It could potentially open up the web to more people around the world as addresses could be in characters as diverse as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic - in which Russian is written.

Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's new President and CEO, said that if the change is approved, ICANN would begin accepting applications for non-English domain names and that the first entries into the system would likely to come in mid 2010. Of the 1.6 billion Internet users worldwide, Beckstrom - a former Chief of U.S. cybersecurity, said that more than half use languages that have scripts based on alphabets other than Latin.

Enabling the change, Thrush said that it is the creation of a translation system that allows multiple scripts to be converted to the right address. "We're confident that it works because we've been testing it now for a couple of years. And we're really ready to start rolling it out."

However, Beckstrom recalled that 3-5 years ago many people had said that using non-Latin scripts for domain names would be impossible to achieve. "But the community, the policy groups and staff and board have worked through them, which is absolutely incredible," he said.