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On 40th Birthday, Internet To End Rule Of Latin Characters.The internet is about to get more accessible for millions worldwide with the imminent approval of a new multilingual address system that uses Asian and Arabic scripts, a global regulator said on Monday.The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said it would declare an end to the exclusive use of Latin characters for website addresses on Friday — the final day of its six-day conference in Seoul.
        This is the biggest change technically to the internet since it was invented 40 years ago”, Peter Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board in charge of reviewing the change, said. Thrush said he expected ICANN’s
full board to grant approval on Friday — a day after the 40th anniversary of the internet’s birth in an experiment at the University of California, Los Angeles.When the change comes into force, it will be possible to use characters from other languages — such as Chinese, Arabic, Korean and Japanese — for a full internet address, instead of just part of the address as now.
ICANN president Rod Beckstrom said internet addresses would no longer use limited “Generic Top-Level Domains” such as .com or .org, and instead use more flexible “Internationalised Domain Names” such as .post or .bank. Beckstrom said the change would also allow internet users to type fewer keystrokes to access a website which will “give companies a quicker way to get directly to their customers”.The world would be able to “save roughly 60 to 100 billion human keystrokes a day” by getting rid of keystrokes that are currently needed to find web addresses ending, for example, in individual country codes,he said.Under the new system, all web addresses ending .bank would only be available to “authorised” banks.