Reading the Bangkok Post over breakfast this morning I note that ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) have announced that as on Friday (30th October 09) they should get approval for URL's to use non Latin alphabets (in their entirety, not just partially as is currently the case).
By mid 2010 it should therefore be possible for brands operating in Chinese, Arabic, Korean and Japanese languages to have relevant web addresses. This move is aimed at improving user experience, helping consumers reach sites more quickly across the huge parts of the world that use non-Latin based scripts and combined with restrictions on top level domain names being lifted (for example banks will be able to have .bank as a suffix etc rather than being restricted to .com, .co.uk. co.jp) etc should save an estimated 60-100 billion keystrokes a day worldwide!
I'll be off to twiddle my thumbs with all that spare time saved. Meanwhile if you have brands operating in those markets I'd be off to register interest in the domains pretty quickly so that there's no cybersquatting issues.
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