The board of directors of the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) voted for a  Fast-Track Process for applying for an IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) and will begin accepting applications on Nov. 16.

Starting in mid-November, countries and territories will be able to apply to show domain names in their native language.

Currently, domain names can only be displayed using the Latin alphabet letters A-Z, the digits 0-9 and the hyphen, but in future countries will be able to display country-code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) in their native language.

This would allow Web addresses in Korean, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese and other languages

Rod Beckstrom, ICANN CEO said today:

“This is one of the most exciting developments for the users of the Internet globally in years,” said Beckstrom. “IDNs will enable the people the world over to use domain name addresses in their own language.”

“This is only the first step, but it is an incredibly big one and an historic move toward the internationalization of the Internet,”

“We have just made the Internet much more accessible to millions of people in regions such as Asia, the Middle East and Russia.”

ICANN has set some language restrictions for IDNs: they must be in an official language of a country or territory and have legal status or at minimum “serve as a language of administration.”

According to the proposal, ICANN will charge registries US$26,000 for an evaluation processing fee, which can be paid in the local currency. ICANN would also like an annual contribution fee of 3 percent of a registries revenue, which can be as low as 1 percent for low-volume registries.

Personally I have no current IDN’s in gTLD which have been allowed in some language for years,  but Elliotsblog.com had an excellent discussion on IDN’s the other day and I urge all domainers to read it as these have just become much more important in the domain world.