ICANN President and CEO Rod Beckstrom speaks on Oct. 26, 2009. AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon

My friend Rob pointed this story out to me the other day, but today was the day that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (that’s ICANN) agreed to go ahead with the Internationalized Domain Name Fast Track Process Friday morning, allowing non-Roman characters to be used in top-level domain names. Jacqui Cheng of Ars Technica reported the news which came on the last day of a weeklong ICANN meeting in Seoul, South Korea.

Top-level domains are the very end of addresses used on the Internet. So the .com, .net, .info, .us, .cn, all of those are top-level domains. Non-Roman characters are OK to use in the middle of the domain, but at the top level, no way. At least, until the Internationalized Domain Name Fast Track Process goes through.

What does that mean? In short, it’ll probably mean a whole lot of new users on the Internet, because it’s going to lower the language barriers that exist now. ICANN Chairman of the Board Peter Dengate Thrush said he believes it’s the biggest change in Internet technology in 40 years.

Kelly Olsen of the Associated Press wrote about the issue earlier in the week. In the article, Olsen quoted ICANN’s CEO and president Rod Beckstrom as saying the first of the new top-level domains would go through in mid-2010. Beckstrom also said that more than half of the world’s 1.6 billion Internet users use non-Roman languages, so this is a move that’s likely to make it easier for them to use the Internet.

Enabling the move, Olsen said, is a system that translates many different alphabets to resolve Internet addresses. The technology has been undergoing tests for some time, and Dengate Thrush said it’s ready to be implemented.

For more on Internet technology, take a look at these articles:

Who owns the Internet?
How did the Internet start?
How Domain Name Servers Work