ICANN to Fast Track Internationalized Domains

From an ICANN press release:

"Domain Names, which are currently mainly limited to characters from the Latin or Roman scripts, are seen as an important element in enabling the multilingualization of the Internet, reflecting the diverse and growing language needs of all users. . . .

Thanks to ICANN’s evaluation of Internationalized Domain Names, Internet users around the globe can now access wiki pages with the domain name "example.test" in the 11 test languages — Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil. The wikis will allow Internet users to establish their own sub pages with their own names in their own language; one suggestion is: example.test/yourname." See

http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-2-13nov07.htm

Same thing holds true for ccTLD's; see http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-13nov07.htm.

This means that at some point an Internet user in China could type in a domain name using Chinese characters for both the top- and second-level domain names. Cool!