Up until now ICANN, the organization that assigns Internet domain names was busy with different TLDs to make domain name more custom, but always limited within roman characters. It’s been a long time coming. A little over seven years ago, ICANN, committed to the idea of providing support for internationalization of those names. ICANN has now announced that the first sites using fully internationalized domain names will be accessible to Internet users starting Monday (15^th Aug 2007).

On Monday ICANN will begin testing of whether allowing the character sets of 11 languages to be included in top-level domains (TLDs) causes widespread online anarchy.

Currently, the use of non-Roman characters is allowed in all portions of the domain name before the TLD extension. As a result, a site with content that’s entirely in the Japanese alphabet can have the TLD name portion of its URL in Japanese, yet the TLD still needs to end in an “.org” or “.com” in Roman characters. The changes that come Monday are an important step towards the ultimate internationalization.

ICANN’s president, Dr Paul Twomey says-

This will be one of the biggest changes to the Internet since it was created….This evaluation represents ICANN’s most important step so far towards the full implementation of Internationalised Domain Names
-Source: AFP

Only a single set of sites (example.test) will be made available, and that site will simply contain a wiki page. But “example.test” sites will be accessible using URLs in a total of 11 alphabets: Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese, and Tamil. So far three of the languages being tested by ICANN- Greek, Cantonese (in Chinese script) and Arabic.

In addition to handling non non-roman character sets, the introduction of multi-language TLDs also requires that root servers can process addresses presented in right-to-left reading languages such as Arabic. Another issue is Unicode characters will open a world of possibilities for phishers, who can use similar looking characters in different alphabets to spoof commercial domains (Especially financial institution’s domain).

There is a whole lot of international politics and mud fight going on regarding this(See WSJ story for this).Regardless of technical and security barrier, full internationalization of TLD’s just simply a step towards accepting the truth: “Internet” is truly “International Net”.