Monday, Oct 26, 2009    Text size: 

ICANN first tested the characters in 2007 by allowing webmasters to try out the non-Roman URLs with domains that ended in dot-test. Now the organization is planning to meet this week in Seoul, South Korea, to discuss the possibility of adding non-Roman characters to URLs.

According to online reports, characters from the following languages will be fair game under the new set-up: Arabic, Persian, Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Hebrew, Japanese, Tamil, and both simplified and traditional Chinese. If all goes to plan, users should start seeing the new domains early next year.

"This is the biggest change technically to the internet since it was invented 40 years ago," ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush said.

Although the addition of non-Roman characters to URLs might herald a more open era for the Internet, HotMovies Director of Marketing James Cybert told XBIZ that his company tried a similar tactic a few years ago when they bought about 50 domains that spelled common Japanese sexual slang terms in phonetic English.

"We gave it a shot, but the traffic was very limited," he said. "In the short term, how many end-users are going to know that they can type in those characters?"

In addition, spammers might be able to exploit this new option to buy phony domains that look like larger domains. For example, a phisher could simply add a non-Roman character to a common domain like Google.com and wind up with a web address that not only looks like Google at a glance, but that also has a dot-com ending.