Internet regulator approves non-Latin alphabets

The first non-Latin international domain names (IDNs) could be in use as soon as the summer of next year.

In what has been described as one of the biggest technological changes to the way the internet works since its creation 40 years ago, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) approved plans for web addresses in Arabic, Chinese, Russian and other scripts.

More than half of the 1.6 billion people who use the internet speak languages with non-Latin scripts such as Sanskrit. Until now these IDNs have been limited to the 26 characters in the Latin alphabet used in English (A-Z) as well as 10 numbers and the hyphen.

Soon people with little or no knowledge of Latin scripts will be able to enter a web address in their native language. This will add around 100,000 new characters in a move Icann said is “set to transform the online world”.

The internet regulator, formed in 1998 by the US government, said it would accept the first applications for IDNs by 16 November, with the first up and running by "mid-2010".

This means someone in Russia could write out www.computeractive.co.uk using the Cyrillic alphabets to access the website.

The programme will be rolled out in stages, and initially IDNs will only be allowed on a limited basis involving country codes. These are the suffixes at the end of an address name, such as .jp (for Japan) or .ru (for Russia). Those countries can now use IDNs to replace these; eventually, the use of IDNs will be vastly expanded to all types of internet address names.

However, some internet experts are concerned about security issues and the change could fracture the cohesion of the internet.