Wikpedia states, "An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains one or more non-ASCII characters. Such domain names could contain letters with diacritics, as required by many languages, or characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Devanagari or Hebrew." This example is an example of a greek IDN.I have been following the news on this topic for about the past month and just heard today that ICANN has finally authorized a new plan that will allow web extensions and e-mail addresses to contain non-latin characters. This is a historic change considering that for over four decades only the latin character set has been accessible for IDNs. With this new announcement, there will be over 100,000 characters available that represent the various languages of the world.
ICANN felt this was a necessary step in order to expand the use of the worldwide web for people who do not understand English. Beginning November 16th, applications will be accepted for top level domains or internet extensions based on that nations character set. In the future, ICANN is hoping to incorporate the top level domains (i.e. .com, .org and .net) into the IDN system.
After years of testing, studying and discussing international domain names we will soon operate as a global, worldwide network! Make sure to click on this link, it's a great video and explains it all!
