JuliannaICANN has approved the first four internationalized top-level domain names (IDNs) for Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. In a statement released yesterday, ICANN president and CEO Rod Beckstrom called it “a pivotal moment in the history of Internet domain names.”
Why exactly is the support of internationalized top-level domain names so significant? For starters, the exclusivity of the Latin alphabet in Internet’s top-level domains (TLDs) has officially come to an end. Domain names have been limited to thirty-seven characters since their creation in the 1980’s, including the twenty-six “A to Z” letters of the Latin alphabet, hyphens and numbers 1 through 10.
Internet users will now be able to access sites and services in those countries using domains expressed in non-Latin character sets, for example Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Devanagari, Hebrew, Korean, and Cyrillic.
Support for non-Latin domains has been described as the most significant shift in the way the Internet’s top-level domain name system works since it first launched 40 years ago. The move is regarded as a major step towards making the Internet more accessible to an estimated 1.6 billion Internet users whose languages have writing systems that aren’t based on the Latin alphabet.
In a statement to the Associated Press, Beckstrom described the support of IDN’s as “also an issue of pride of people and their own culture and their own language, and a recognition that the Internet belongs to everyone.”
Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates are the first four of sixteen IDN requests representing eight languages received by ICANN to pass String Evaluation; the remaining twelve IDN requests are still being processed. ICANN noted on its official blog yesterday that it looks forward to finalizing the other requests, as well as receiving new requests.
In coming months internationalized domains will also go live in the Internet domain names root system, which will allow people to type entire domain names in their own language.
A staff support function is available to help all countries and territories interested in participating in the Fast Track Process. Inquiries can be sent directly to ICANN by emailing idncctldrequests@icann.org.
Read More:
ICANN Announcement | First IDN ccTLDs Requests Successfully Pass String Evaluation
ICANN Blog