MARINA DEL REY, CA - The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body that oversees the Internet addressing system, announced on March 14 that it will be testing Arabic, Chinese and other non-Roman characters in domain names, according to combined news agencies.
The Internet currently runs on an ASCII system with 26 letters of the alphabet, 10 numerals and a hyphen. However, people in Asian and Arab countries, whose languages can contain thousands of characters, are applying pressure on ICANN to include their native scripts in web addresses.
The new domains will be tested in the latter half of 2006 to ensure if they go live that they do not interfere with the current operation of the Internet, which was not built to accommodate non-Latin languages.