Internationalisation of the Internet Begins

In what has been billed as the “biggest change” to the Internet “since it was invented 40 years ago”, net regulator Icann has invited countries to apply for “internationalised domain names” in the non-Latin characters. Egypt hasn’t wasted any time in doing so by announcing their decision to apply to use Arabic characters in its Internet domain name.

This is likely to “internationalise the Internet” according to Rod Beckstrom, CEO and President of Icann (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), who is excited about the prospects of such a global market.

“A major step in internationalising the Internet”

Traditionally, Domain Name Systems recognise Latin text and convert it into streams of numbers known as IP Addresses. These systems will now accept non-Latin text and will be able to convert them into recognisable web pages.

It presents a great opportunity to open up the rest of the world to your website. Mr. Beckstrom continued by saying: "The opening of the IDN application process today (November 16 2009) will go down in history as a major step in Internationalizing the Internet.”

As well as Arabic applications from Egypt and, earlier, Saudi Arabia, applications from Japan and China are expected. With such a global market becoming available, optimising site content could take on a whole new form so that this market is reached.

Making the Internet More Accessible to Millions

Mr. Beckstrom added: "More than half of the world's Internet users do not use a Latin-based script for their native language, so this marks the beginning of a process that will make the Internet more accessible to millions of those online users today and potentially billions tomorrow.”

These changes were first agreed to in 2008 but they aren’t expected to take effect until 2010. With 1.6billion estimated users of the Internet in the world the scope to broadcast your message will grow exponentially.

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