The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) recently voted to allow for non-Latin characters to be used in top level domain names (.com, .jp, .cn, etc.). Previous to this announcement Chinese, Arabic, Korean and other non-Latin characters could be used before the ‘dot,’ but the URL always ended with letters from the Latin alphabet. Now, an entire URL can be written in non-Latin characters. The hope is that this will make the Internet more accessible to millions of people. Some are concerned that allowing other languages in the domain names will make it harder to fight cyberattacks, but ICANN seems to think such concerns are unwarranted.
For more statistics and opinions you can find the story from the NYT.
