San Francisco - The organization that oversees the internet has authorized the use of non-Latin characters in domain names in a move that should help the web grow around the world. The adoption of the Internationalized Domain Names system will allow domain names to be written using native character sets such as Chinese, Arabic and Greek.
The move by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was hailed as the "biggest technical change" to the internet since its birth 40 years ago.
"The coming introduction of non-Latin characters represents the biggest technical change to the internet since it was created four decades ago," said ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush in a statement.
"Right now internet address endings are limited to Latin characters - A to Z. But the Fast Track Process is the first step in bringing the 100,000 characters of the languages of the world online for domain names. To see this finally start to unfold is to see the beginning of an historic change in the internet and who uses it."
