ICANN has given the green light for the use of international domain names, which can use anything other than Latin characters.

Internationalization

It therefore passes of 26 letters and some signs to over 100 000 characters. If today it is already possible to use international characters followed by a Latin suffix (. Kr for example), this new decision authorizes the use of more characters and foreign suffixes. Only the "http://" remains unchanged.

Those interested can register a domain name International from 16 November and addresses should be activated from the mid-2010. ICANN will require $ 26 000 to the countries concerned in addition to an annual contribution of 1% to 3% of revenues generated by purchases of new domain names. The sum will be paid with local currency.

Problems for

Firms specializing in security servers have less than ten months to adapt to new applications and new challenges that this decision brings. It will also prepare users for new phishing threats that it represents. Indeed, the number of homoglyphes will grow and it is not always easy to distinguish between Latin and character of an international character. Access to these domain names will also be more difficult for those using a keyboard classical Latin.

This decision reflects the global reach of the web, but is not without controversy. ICANN has prepared himself by making certain restrictions. Only languages with legal status or administrative languages may be used and accented Latin letters were not authorized. No doubt that this new measure, which is the biggest upheaval in ICANN since its invention 40 years ago, are going to have lot of problems. The question is how they are managed.