ICANN board announced Internet Domain Names in International Languages would come into effect in 2010

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced that it would declare an end to the exclusive use of Latin characters-the script in which English and most other European languages are written for website addresses.

ICANN president Rod Beckstrom said the change would come into effect in the middle of 2010. Icann aims to start receiving applications next month. As of now we had control only over websites with the suffix .in. This suffix will soon be replaced with .bharat in the scheduled Indian languages

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Once domain names in Indian scripts come into existence, www.google.in could be written as www.google.bharat-in Indian scripts. Indian scripts would also be enabled for suffixes such as .org and .co. Most probably the users can type out the address of a website in the scripts of any of the country’s 22 official languages.

The Icann board chairman said that when the change comes into force, it will be possible to use characters from languages such as Chinese, Arabic, Korean and Japanese as well for a full internet address. Hence 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.

These changes 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.