Today ICANN approved the use of non-Latin characters in domain names:

The first Internet addresses containing non-Latin characters from start to finish will soon be online thanks to today’s approval of the new Internationalized Domain Name Fast Track Process… (view the release here)

ICANN’s President and CEO says that with this change there will be 100,000 more characters added to what we can use today. Some think that this is a pain, is inconvenient, and will divide the internet more than it already is. Like David Coursey.

Open it up

I say that this change isn’t as bad as some of these xenophobes says it is. I think that with technology growing at a rapid pace, something will be developed that will help us make some sense of these new characters being added to our domain names. For instance Google Language Tools is pretty damn robust and adding more functionality every day. Who is to say that services like this will not pick up the slack and help us latin character users become more comfortable with this change.

What about URL shortners?

Something else that Coursey may have overlooked is the ever growing popularity of URL shortners. Although the reliability of these shortners is debatable, there use and adoption is almost becoming ubuiquitous when passing around links via Twitter.

What if, instead of typing in characters that we don’t understand to the address bar, we just create a shortened URL and then pass it along? This is probably what will come from the use of non-Latin characters in the future. And who really types a URL into the address bar anymore anyways? Most people just do a quick search via Google and filter their information that way.

Because of this, I am not as scared that our internet is being taking away from us as some are.