Internet agency approves domains in native scripts

Four countries and two territories have won preliminary approval to have Internet addresses written entirely in their native scripts as early as this summer.

Since their creation in the 1980s, Internet domain names such as those that end in ".com" have been limited to 37 characters: the 10 numerals, the hyphen and the 26 letters in the Latin alphabet used in English. Technical tricks have been used to allow portions of the Internet addresses to use other scripts, but until now, the suffix had to use only those 37 characters. With the addition of non-Latin suffixes, Internet users with little or no knowledge of English would no longer have to type Latin characters to access Web pages targeting Chinese, Arabic and other speakers.