Brand owners should be aware of the imminent introduction of
non-Latin characters for internet domain names both to protect
their brand identities and to use them to reach a wider audience,
says the CEO of Nominet,
the national registry for .uk domain names.
Speaking from Korea, where the announcement was made, Nominet
CEO Lesley Cowley said some 1.6 billion people use the internet and
a further 5 billion are not yet online.
"Most of these people speak languages that are not based on the
Latin script," she said. "Opening up the web to allow Asian, Arabic
and other non-Latin based scripts will give everyone easier access
to the web, making the internet more inclusive."
The internet will soon support website addresses in non-Roman
scripts such as Arabic and Chinese following the approval last
night of a
new internationalised domain name fast-track process by the
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
board.
ICANN chairman Peter Thrush said the fast-track process is the
first step to using all the 100,000 characters of the world's
languages for domain names.
Web experts have been testing the non-Latin characters for the
past three years. Countries will be able to start testing
country-code top-level domains from 16 November. Thrush said he
expected to see the first non-Latin scripts in use inn 2010.