ICANN announces international domain names for mid-2010

November 2, 4:52 PMOnline Publishing ExaminerPeggy Hazelwood

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Beginning as early as mid-2010, Internet users will be able to use their language as the ending portion of their web address or URL.

Up to now, domain names had to end in letters from the Latin alphabet. The ability for an Internet user in China or Arab-speaking countries and many others to end their domain name in their native language did not exist. That's the say, the portion of the URL that comes after the (dot) as in .com had to be written in Latin letters.

According to Rod Beckstrom, president and CEO of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, "Over half of the 1.6 billion users of the Internet today are born in a language group that does not use Latin scripts. So for them, this is a very, very big deal because they've had to type in their keyboard in their native script — for example in a word processor or something else — and then switch modes to type a domain name, which is really quite an inconvenience."

ICANN establishes the standards and policies for all domain names.