São Paulo – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) may approve the end of the use of Latin characters as the only ones accepted in URLs.
The decision should be announced on Friday (30th), on the last day of the ICAAN conference held in Seoul, South Korea. The ICANN was established by the United States government, in 1998, to oversee internet domain names.
The new Web addresses may be fully written in languages such as Arabic, Japanese, Greek, Korean, Cyrillic (the alphabet that the Russian language is written in) and Hindi.
According to Rod Beckstrom, the chairman and CEO of ICANN, if the new measure is approved, the new addresses should be put to use starting in mid-2010. The organization should start receiving requests next month.
The new features should benefit more than half of the 1.6 billion Internet users worldwide, who speak languages not written using Latin characters, according to Beckstrom.
“This is the biggest technical change since the internet was invented 40 years ago,” said Peter Thrush, chairman of the board at ICANN and the person responsible for the change, in a press conference.
In order to make the change possible, a translation system will be devised allowing for various writing codes to be converted to the correct address.
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
