Internet Addresses to Go International

The change will affect the Uniform Resource Locator or URL, which is the address you type in to go to a site. Typically, that's something like http://www.abc.com. Until now, these URLs have been formed only with Latin characters. That means, to be clear, you are currently not going to see Chinese, Japanese or other non-Latin characters in an URL.

The problem with that is that more than half of the 1.6 billion people who use the internet speak languages with non-Latin characters. However, the board of ICANN voted at its annual meeting in Seoul to allow domain names in Arabic, Chinese and other scripts.

This is something that's been asked about for a long time, and perhaps the biggest change in the Internet since it was first created some 40 years ago.

These new domain names (e.g., HULIQ.com is a domain name) will see use as early as 2010. They will be known as Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs). Plans for IDNs were first approved at an ICANN meeting in June 2008, but testing of the system has been going on for two years.

In order for this to work, the Internet's Domain Name Servers (DNS) will have to be changed to accept Latin and non-Latin characters. The DNS servers, of which a root system of master servers exist and are replicated worldwide, exist to translate something like http://www.HULIQ.com into a set of numbers (an IP address) that computers can understand.

When a change is made to a root DNS server, it has to be spread throughout the world (gradually), which is why a change to the IP address for a given domain may take hours or days to be recognized.

Based on the obvious number of users at question, it is likely the majority of early non-Latin net addresses to be approved will be in Chinese and Arabic script, followed by Russian. Some Asian countries have already introduced workarounds for non-Latin scripts, but these are not internationally approved and do not work on all computers.

ICANN was founded in 1998 by the US government to oversee the development of the Internet. As the Internet grew, the U.S. government was criticized for years for its oversight of ICANN. Last month, it relaxed its control over the non-profit ICANN body.

Written by Michael Santo