EQUTE — ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has recently announced efforts to adopt non-English characters in domain names.

The news could be a major change in the way the Internet is set up, turning the focus away from the US and letting countries have a more localized way to access the internet. ICANN said that of the 1.6 billion people on the Internet, over half use non-Latin characters.

“This is an extremely important meeting for ICANN, since the IDN program is moving one step closer to reshaping the global Internet landscape,” ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom said in a statement. “In Seoul, we plan to move forward to the next step in the internationalization of the Internet, which means that eventually people from every corner of the globe will be able to navigate much of the online world using their native language scripts.”

ICANN brass went on to say that it’s not just a half-baked idea, they have been working on implementing such changes for years.

“We’re confident that it works because we’ve been testing it now for a couple of years,” Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of ICANN’s board, said in a statement. “And so we’re really ready to start rolling it out.”

They admit that there will be some hurdles to leap when the IDNs (Internationalized Domain Names) roll out, namely that many applications won’t work with the new URLs. But they are putting up measures that take aim at people who would grab up convenient domains from other countries. ICANN has a “meaningfulness requirement” stating that the domain must mean something.

China is pushing for the new IDNs, and if they do roll out on a broad scale, applications would surely follow.

It will be interesting to see what happens if this does happen, it may mean a greater segregation of the internet — which could be a good thing and it could help advertisers by clearly showing who is using sites and seeing ads.