ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is to trial international characters in domain names, opening the use of non-English characters such as é, and ü. The trials will begin in July. ICANN makes the case that the geographic extent of the Internet is constantly expanding, and as such the linguistic diversity is also expanding. The 'full potential of the Internet for serving as a global communications platform' will be unleased through this move, according to ICANN.
'The DNS and domain names were not originally developed to accommodate languages that use non-Latin scripts, or require diacritical addition to Latin characters,' ICANN explained. 'As the Internet continues to grow, many new users are interested in being able to write domain names using their local languages and scripts.'