The Internet's global regulator, ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has approved a new multilingual address system. This change is the biggest since the internet's invention 40 years ago.

The exclusive use of Latin characters in web addresses has now ended and ICANN's ruling now means that web and email addresses can be written in non-Latin characters - such as Chinese, Arabic, Korean, Hindu, Japanese.

Domain names - such as electrastar.co.uk could be written in the other languages and be understood by computers that inter-connect over the web.

This change is designed to cater for the growing number of non English speaking Internet users and comes into force in the middle of 2010.

For example, Japanese or Arabic script, can be used in the first part, but whatever language is used, the address must end with a very important collection of Latin alphabet characters, .co.uk, .com, .gov, .cn etc. Leave off these Latin letters on the end, and the website simply will not work.

ICANN President, Rod Beckstrom said "Of the 1.6 billion users today worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not Latin-based"

In the internet's early years, most users spoke English and wrote in the Latin alphabet but times have now changed. The way forward now surely has to be to create a universal internet address code that works on all computers in any language.

Icann, was set up by the US government, in 1998 to oversee the development of the net. Recently, after years of criticism, the US government eased its control over the non-profit body by signing an agreement which came into effect on 1st October that gave them autonomy for the first time thus putting it under the scrutiny of the global internet community.

As a final note, try and imagine this scenario we have but in reverse. With every European and North American website being forced to include a few letters of Japanese in its domain name!

Visit the News article at www.icann.org to read more.