Internet inches closer to ‘internationalisation’

The first applications were accepted on Monday for internationalised domain names (IDNs), in one of the most significant steps to making the Internet more accessible around the globe.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has opened the application process, ending the exclusive use of Latin characters for website addresses.

On the first day, “we have already received six applications from around the world for three different scripts,” ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom told an Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Egypt’s Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

He said that while ICANN could not reveal the names of those applying, Egypt – with .misr, meaning Egypt in Arabic – and Russia had already made public their applications for country code top level domains in their scripts.

With the introduction of “internationalised” domain names (IDNs), scripts such as Chinese, Korean or Arabic will eventually be usable in the last part of an address name – the part after the dot, as in .com and .org.

“It’s an historic moment,” Beckstrom said.

Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/internet-inches-closer-to-internationalisation-1821930.html

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