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Azerbaijan to have national-alphabet domain names

29 October 2009 13:56 (UTC +04:00)

Baku. Aynur Veliyeva - APA-Economics. Azerbaijan will have national-alphabet domain names after the Internet got its biggest technical change ever, as a new multilingual address system, approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

National alphabet domains will be available in Azerbaijan after the non-Latin domains are issued worldwide, said Rasim Aliguliyev, Director of Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences.

In his words, ICANN has announced that it will receive applications for non-Latin domains from November 15 and 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.

ICANN said at its six-day conference in Seoul it would declare an end to the exclusive use of Latin characters for website addresses.

ICANN President Rod Beckstrom said the change â€“ designed to serve the growing number of non-English-speaking Internet users.

"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 worldâ€™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 addressâ€™ end.

ICANN, formed in 1998 by the US government, was recently given more autonomy after Washington relaxed its control over the Internet operation.