The nonprofit body that oversees Internet addresses approved Friday the use of Arabic, Hindi, Korean and other scripts not based on the Latin alphabet in a decision that could make the Web dramatically more inclusive. The board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers – or ICANN – voted to allow such scripts in so-called domain names at the conclusion of a weeklong meeting in Seoul, South Korea's capital. The decision follows years of debate and testing. The decision clears the way for governments or their designees to submit requests for specific names, likely beginning Nov. 16. Internet users could start seeing them in use early next year, particularly in Arabic, Chinese and other scripts in which demand has been among the highest, ICANN officials say. “This represents one small step for ICANN, but one big step for half of mankind who use non-Latin scripts, such as those in Korea, China and the Arabic speaking world as well as across Asia, Africa, and the rest of the world,” Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's CEO, said ahead of the vote. Domain names – the Internet addresses that end in “.com” and other suffixes – are the key monikers behind every Web site, e-mail address and Twitter post. Since their creation in the 1980s, domain names have been limited to the 26 characters in the Latin alphabet used in English – A-Z – as well as 10 numerals and the hyphen. Technical tricks have been used to allow portions of the Internet address to use other scripts, but until now, the suffix had to use those 37 characters. That has meant Internet users with little or no knowledge of English might still have to type in Latin characters to access Web pages in Chinese or Arabic. Although search engines can sometimes help users reach those sites, companies still need to include Latin characters on billboards and other advertisements. Many of the estimated 1.5 billion people online use languages such as Chinese, Thai, Arabic and Japanese, which have writing systems entirely different from English, French, German, Indonesian, Swahili and others that use Latin characters. Tina Dam, the ICANN senior director for internationalized domain names, said Saudi Arabia, UAE, China and Russia were among a handful of countries that has pushed hardest for official non-Latin suffixes. About 50 such names are likely to be approved in the first few years. But there will be several restrictions at first. Countries can only request one suffix for each of their official languages, and the suffix must somehow reflect the name of the country or its abbreviation. Non-Latin versions of “.com” and “.org” won't be permitted for at least a few more years as ICANN considers broader policy questions such as whether the incumbent operator of “.com” should automatically get a Chinese version, or whether that more properly goes to China, as its government insists. ICANN also is initially prohibiting Latin suffixes that go beyond the 37 already-permitted characters. That means suffixes won't be able to include tildes, accent marks and other special characters. And software developers still have to make sure their applications work with the non
