The Internet’s over lords have
announced that for the first time in history, non-Latin language website addresses
are under process. According to the US-based Internet Corporation for Assigned
Names and Numbers (ICANN), the online domains in which website addresses would
end with words in Chinese, Russian and Arabic have been approved.
“it’s happening-the biggest
change to the internet since its inception,” said Akram Atallah, the president
of ICANN’s Generic Domain Division. Online neighborhoods with addresses ending
in the Chinese word for “Game” the Arabic word for “Web” or “Network” or the
Cyrillic words for “Cite” and “Online” have been cleared and more should quickly
follow suit, ICANN said.
ICANN is considering more than
1800 requests for new web address ending, ranging from the general such as “shop”
to the highly specialized like “motorcycles”.
There are currently just 22
gTLDs, of which “.com” and “.net” comprise the lion’s share of online
addresses.
With this new change, many trade
mark companies can use their name as their domain. Apple, Mitsubishi, IBM and
BBC have registered their requests and Google have requested more than 100 names.
