Domain names can soon be registered using Chinese characters or Cyrillic script, ending the exclusivity of the Latin alphabet in top-level domain names, according to a Friday ICANN vote.

ICANN, the net’s ruling body on naming, expects the change will help make bring even more users to the internet. Currently, domain name endings (e.g. .com and .us) can be composed only of the Latin letters A to Z, numbers and dashes. India, for instance, has 22 official languages and each could get its top-level domain. Applications will start on November 16, and the first non-Latin domain names will be live sometime next year.

Allowing other languages and scripts, comes as an addition to ICANN’s June 2008 decision to allow nearly limitless top-level domains. It allowed for instance .halloween, so long as a registrar is willing to pay hundreds of thousands to set up and manage that top-level domain.

The approval of Internationalised Domain Names will also likely lead to another boom in domain-name registrations. Companies will be forced to protect their brand by registering yet more variations of their current domains (think Coca-Cola in every language possible). Domain-name speculators will race to buy as many names as they can in languages they don’t understand in order to create more contentless “landing” pages to make money from people who accidentally type that URL into a browser address bar.

The vote came on the final day of ICANN’s meeting in Seoul, Korea.

“This is only the first step, but it is an incredibly big one and an historic move toward the internationalization of the internet,” said Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s President and CEO. “The first countries that participate will not only be providing valuable information of the operation of IDNs in the domain name system, they are also going to help to bring the first of billions more people online — people who never use Roman characters in their daily lives.”

Countries with officially registered languages will get to go first through a fast-track process. Names for those domains must be composed entirely of the non-Latin characters of that particular language — no mongrel names combining scripts from separate languages will be allowed.

Security experts have cautioned that expanding the net’s domain-name system will lead to more cybercrime and fraud, but ICANN decided that the threat was minimal, compared to the benefits of attracting more users to the net.

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