The internet changed forever when the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) gave the green light for non-Latin character to be registered as web addresses. This is very significant compared to when it was invented 40 years ago. For the past 40 years, web addresses are all made up of Latin based character, however, most internet users do not use Latin based languages.

The move by ICANN was welcomed by many non-Latin language speaking countries such as Japan, China, Russia, Thailand, India, Korea, and the Arabian nations. According to ICANN, we have almost 2 billion internet users to date, and statistics showed that almost 1 billion of them do not use Latin based languages. This language shake-up process will now initiate another online race to register highly sort after domain names such as shopping.com in the non-Latin languages. We are already seeing signs of registration frenzy in the Arabic script web addresses. Highly popular web address can fetch a handsome amount of money for the owner, provided that there is an interested buyer.

ICANN’s main purpose for introducing the non-Latin web addresses is to make the World Wide Web truly global and accessible for everyone. The Arabic countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates are amongst the first few to have their so-called country code top-level domains (CCTLDs) written in the Arabic scripts. Previously, country code for Egypt has to be written as ".eg" in the Latin script. The new system will allow these Arabic script domain names to be written fully right to left. Here are the examples of country codes:

• Egypt: مصر
• Saudi Arabia: السعودية
• UAE: امارات

Critics argued that with the introduction of multi-script web-addresses, peace and unity through the World Wide Web can no longer be achieved. However, one should note that even before the plans to introduce the CCTLDs, countries such as China and Egypt have been publishing their web content in their own language script. Therefore, the deployment of CCTLDs is actually a less drastic change than it looks to be. While Arabic script websites may prove to be a challenge to English readers, there are more and more websites that provide multi-language interfaces and contents. Many American and UK websites have already started to translate their website content few years back so that they can penetrate new foreign markets.

ICANN has stated that the new web domains are available for use now, although more work has to be completed before the system works perfectly for every internet user. While the Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) are already approved by ICANN, it does not mean that every computer will be able to display the scripts correctly. The problem is that computers that we buy off the shelf never come with a complete set of fonts that will allow the operating systems to display every possible IDN in the world. Experts have said that this is not a permanent problem and can be fixed by downloading additional language fonts to correctly display the desire languages.