Internet addresses set for major technical change by 2010

Internet addresses set for major technical change by 2010
Ben Uzor Jr with agency reports
A novel way of typing internet addresses has been approved, described as the ‘biggest technical change’ since the internet was created 40 years ago, Business Day has learnt.
The organisation that oversees them has backed the use of non-Latin characters from languages like Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Hindi and Korean. Before hand, top-level domains (TLDs – the end of web addresses like .com and .co.uk) have been limited to the 26 characters in the Latin alphabet used in English (A-Z) as well as 10 numbers and the hyphen. This has implied that internet users with little or no knowledge of English Language may still have to type in Latin characters to access their country’s web pages.
As it stands now, web address using characters from different languages will be available by mid 2010. It was gathered that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) board at a meeting in Seoul, South Korea has approved their use.
To this effect, nations and territories will be able to apply for internet address endings reflecting their name and using their national language from November 16, once ICANN’s Internationalised Domain Name (IDN) fast track process commences.
If the applications meet certain criteria, including government and community support and a stability evaluation, the applicants will be approved to start accepting registrations for domain names. Business Day checks reveal that more than half the world’s internet users do not use English or Latin-based language as their first language and this move will see around 100, 000 new characters available for use in IDNs. The internet’s origin can be traced to experiments at United States (US) universities in 1969 but it was not until the early 1990s that its use began expanding beyond academia and research institutions to the public. Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of ICANN stated: “The coming introduction of non-Latin characters represents the biggest technical change to the internet since it was created four decades ago.” In the same vein, Joe White of Gandi.net, which provides internet services based on domain names added: “This first wave of applicants will give an early indication as to how the structure of the internet might evolve by giving a glimpse of which new TLDs might arrive first. “It will prompt businesses to start thinking about how to adapt their strategy, whether they want to run their own TLD or register a domain within a new TLD such as .lawyer. “Consumers will start to form opinions on whether they trust the new TLDs any more, whether they see any value in them, and whether it’s really as exciting as ICANN thinks it will be.”