The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) have unanimously voted to end the Latin alphabet monopoly on the internet. Instead Hindi, Hebrew and a huge variety of other scripts will all be allowed to use domain names.
Meeting in Seoul, South Korea, the move was met by standing ovation. It means that billions of individuals from countries such as Russian and China will be able to use native characters instead of the Latin alphabet which has been imposed upon them. Icann’s CEO Rod Beckstrom explained that the move was a revolution. “This represents one small step for Icann but one big step for half of mankind who use non-Latin scripts, such as those in Korea, China and the Arabic-speaking world as well as across Asia, Africa, and the rest of the world,” he said.
After three years of testing and talking through the future for domain names, governments will now be able to ask for specific domain names in their own languages script. Whilst many web pages themselves are written in languages not using Latin script, many individuals first had to navigate their way to these sites, all of which had domain names with, what to them, was a foreign language. Analysts International’s CEO Edward Yu expressed that “this was absolutely delightful news.”
Icann expressed that the new domain names are likely to start appearing early in 2010 after the submitting process opens on November 21st.
