A Multilingual Web Goes Live – Arabic and Cyrillic domain addresses are switched on.

Multilingual Web content has been around for years. Now Web domain names in non-Latin languages are finally arriving–including Arabic addresses launched in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates earlier this month; Cyrillic, launched in Russia last Thursday; and soon Chinese–easing Web access for hundreds of millions of people around the world.

"This is the biggest change in the Internet in 40 years," says Tina Dam, senior director of international domain names for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, which is working on implementing 21 international applications for domain names in 11 languages. "You should have seen the Russian celebration of this, it was so emotional. Suddenly their own language can be used."

By David Talbot

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