The ICANN ratifies the internationalisation of domain names

The Internet regulatory authority has voted to end the monopoly that the Latin alphabet holds over domain names and their extensions. Candidates will start to present the first completely international web addresses in two weeks, with the results planned for release in mid-2010.

As planned, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has officially voted to allow for international writing in domain names. Until now, this option was only partial, as it didn’t take into account the top level domain, which basically means the extensions.

From the 16th of November, an accelerated procedure will be developed, with the first step allowing for IDN’s (Internationalised Domain Names) relative to countries that use characters that are not found in the Latin alphabet. Close to 100 000 new characters will be made available in domain names which, for example, will now be possible in full Chinese language writing. The first additions to the web will be seen in mid-2010.

The president of the ICANN board, Peter Dengate Thrush, stated that "this is the largest technical changes to the Internet since its invention 40 years ago”. “This is only a first step, but an extremely important one, with this being a historical move for the direction of the internationalisation of the Internet”, declared the president of ICANN, Rod Beckstrom.

The .ru for Russia should be one of the first changes seen in this internationalisation effort. While there are fears related to community use, some people are worried about the security risk that this could bring with the appearance of new phising sites (a letter which looks very similar from one alphabet to another may lead to confusion). To try and limit this risk, the ICANN has already envisaged restricting the mix of characters available in the different languages.