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ICANN set to approve non-Latin characters for internet

27 October 2009 15:14 (UTC +04:00)

Baku- APA-Economics. The Internet is set for perhaps its biggest technical change ever, as a new multilingual address system will be approved this week, the global regulatory body said on Monday, AFP reported.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said it would declare an end to the exclusive use of Latin characters for website addresses Friday â€“ the final day of its six-day conference in Seoul.
"This is the biggest change technically to the Internet since it was invented 40 years ago," Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board in charge of reviewing the change, said at a press conference.
When the change comes into force, it will be possible to use characters from other languages â€“ such as Chinese, Arabic, Korean and Japanese â€“ for a full Internet address, instead of for just part of an address now.
ICANN President Rod Beckstrom said the change â€“ designed to serve the growing number of non-English-speaking Internet users â€“ will come into force in the middle of 2010. ICANN aims to receive applications next month.
"Of the 1.6 billion Internet users today worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not Latin-based," Beckstrom said. "So this change is very much necessary for not only half the world’s Internet users today but more than half, probably, of the future users as the Internet continues to spread."
He said Internet addresses would no longer use limited "generic top-level domains" such as .com or .org, and instead use more flexible "Internationalized Domain Names" such as .post or .bank.
Beckstrom said the change would allow Internet users to type fewer keystrokes to access a website and "save roughly 60 to 100 billion human keystrokes a day" globally by getting rid of the last four or six keystrokes at the address’ end.
ICANN, formed in 1998 by the US government, was recently given more autonomy after Washington relaxed its control over the Internet operation.