ICANN, the private body in charge of overseeing the foundations of the Internet has voted in favor of allowing characters other than the Roman alphabet for websites, including traditional and simplified Chinese characters, Russian Cyrillic, Korean Hangul and Hebrew among 16 alphabets.
For the time being however, the changes will only be limited to domains run by national governments such as .us or .uk.
ICANN's vote came after six years of discussions into the matter. The group says that about 40 percent of all websites are controlled by national governments with the other 60 percent being "top level" domains such as .net, .com and .org.
"This is only the first step, but it is an incredibly big one and an historic move toward the internationalization of the Internet," said Rod Beckstrom, CEO of ICANN.
ICANN's vote came after six years of discussions into the matter. The group says that about 40 percent of all websites are controlled by national governments with the other 60 percent being "top level" domains such as .net, .com and .org.
"This is only the first step, but it is an incredibly big one and an historic move toward the internationalization of the Internet," said Rod Beckstrom, CEO of ICANN.
