(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — After years of intense technical testing, policy development, and global co-operation, the first Internet addresses containing non-Latin characters from start to finish will soon be online thanks to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (www.icann.org) board’s approval of the new Internationalized Domain Name Fast Track Process.
According to ICANN’s Friday decision announced at its International Public Meeting in Seoul, its Fast Track Process will begin on 16 November 2009, allowing nations and territories to apply for Internet extensions reflecting their name – and made up of characters from their national language. If the applications meet criteria, which includes government and community support and a stability evaluation, the applicants will be approved to start accepting registrations.
“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 in a statement. “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.”
A topic of discussion since before ICANN’s inception, internationalized domains have been a significant development for regions in Asia, the Middle East, and other areas where languages that don’t use Latin script are used.
“This is only the first step, but it is an incredibly big one and an historic move toward the internationalization of the Internet,” ICANN president and chief executive officer Rod Beckstrom said in a statement. “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.”
It will be interesting to see if ICANN will make any major announcements regarding generic top-level domains, which was also a major topic of discussion at the week’s meeting. Under a new developing program, the number of gTLDs will eventually be expanded from its current list of 21 to include almost any word, in almost any language.
Also, as the threat to DNS constantly increases, Internet security concerns over domain name system security were discussed.
