[geoff01]

Internet addresses will soon contain non-Latin characters after ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, approved one of the biggest changes in the internet's 40-year history.

At a meeting in Seoul ICANN agreed to allow countries to apply for internet addresses using characters from their national language. That could potentially open up the web to more people around the world as addresses could be in characters as diverse as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic. Until now, only the domain name itself could be in non-Latin script, while the web address ending - .com, .org, etc. - had to be given in Latin script.

"This is only the first step, but it is an incredibly big one and a historic move toward the internationalisation of the Internet," said Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's President and CEO, in a statement. "The first countries that participate will not only be providing valuable information of the operation of IDNs [Internationalised Domain Names] in the domain name system, they are also going to help to bring the first of billions more people online – people who never use Roman characters in their daily lives."

Internet addresses work because the Domain Name System (DNS) allows the machines connecting computers on the internet to take web addresses that are easily understood by humans, such as www.telegraph.co.uk, and turn them into Internet Protocol (IP) addresses - the strings of computer-readable numbers that identify websites. ICANN has spent the last couple of years building a translation system that allows web addresses written in non-Latin scripts to be converted into the correct IPs.

"We're confident that it works because we've been testing it now for a couple of years," Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board, said earlier this week. "And so we're really ready to start rolling it out."

Countries will be able to apply for domain names in their native script from November 16 and the first new domains are expected to go live next year.

telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/