International Domain Names (IDNs) – Soon to Be Ready for Prime Time

Sean Michael Kerner of internetnews.com covers the breaking “news of the approval of the new International Domain Names Fast Track Process by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush stated that “The coming introduction of non-Latin characters represents the biggest technical change to the Internet since it was created four decades ago.”

“Right now Internet address endings are limited to Latin characters – A to Z. But the Fast Track Process is the first step in bringing the 100,000 characters of the languages of the world online for domain names.”

On November 16th, 2009, ICANN will allow countries to request their country name as a top-level string with the ability to launch the new extensions in early 2010.

ICANN Announcement (7:10)

There will be some technical issues as indicated in the internetnews.com article , however, Tina Dam, senior director of IDNs at ICANN, points out that, “This is not about ‘the Internet will break suddenly’ or something — the stability is clear and this will be fine and it will be great. It will also be good to have the experience with a limited number of top-level domains and see how it goes, and then build from there. ”

We will be following the story closely to give our take on how it will effect SEO.