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Web domain names may see big change

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The Associated Press

Published: October 27, 2009

SEOUL, South Korea - The Internet is set to undergo one of the biggest changes in its four-decade history with the expected approval this week of international domain names - or addresses - that can be written in languages other than English, an official said Monday.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the nonprofit group that oversees domain names, is meeting this week in Seoul. Domain names are the monikers behind every Web site, e-mail address and Twitter post, such as ".com" and other suffixes.

One of the key issues to be taken up by ICANN's board is whether to allow Internet addresses to be in scripts that are not based on Latin letters. That could open up the Web to more people around the world as addresses could be in characters as diverse as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic, in which Russian is written.

"This is the biggest change technically to the Internet since it was invented 40 years ago," said Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board, calling it a "fantastically complicated technical feature." He said he expects the board to grant approval Friday, the conference's final day.

Enabling the change, Thrush said, is the creation of a translation system that allows multiple scripts to be converted to the right address.

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