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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the prevailing lords of Internet naming, have decided it’s time make the web a little less English-centric. It is expected that during it’s meeting in Seoul, ICANN will allow Internet addresses to be in non-Latin scripts. This would permit addresses in languages such as Arabic, Hindi, Japanese, Greek, Korean, and Cyrillic.
The Internet presently has 1.6 billion users worldwide, with more than half using languages based on alphabets not using Latin characters. “This is the biggest change technically to the Internet since it was invented 40 years ago," Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board, told reporters, calling it a "fantastically complicated technical feature."
The change is expected to be approved Friday, after which ICANN would start accepting applications for non-English domain names. The first such names would appear in the system mid-2010, along with a translation system which allows the different scripts to be converted to the right address.
Image Credit: ICANN
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[3] http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/facebook_be_latest_offer_vanity_urls
[4] http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/domains_20_horizon_icann_votes_laxer_top_level_domains
[5] http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/five_tinyurl_alternatives_and_state_url_shorteners
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