The regulatory body overseeing the internet has approved the use of domain names written in non-Latin characters, reports Al-Jazeera. This change is viewed as the biggest change in the forty year history of the internet.

Wael Ghanim, Google's product and marketing manager for the Middle East and Africa, told Al-Jazeera there is increased interest in Arabic domain names. "The Arabic domain is actually a great initiative... as it solves a clear problem of transliteration [since] there are a lot of different ways where you can write an Arabic name into English." It is estimated that there are approximately 40 million Arab internet users, and the number is rising rapidly.

However, not everyone is happy with the changes. "If Korean is used [for] international communication, foreigners will notbe able to understand and will notbe able to read it well enough, so there could be some problems in communication," internet user Chang Yong-Wong told Al-Jazeera.

Technical advances have been used to allow portions of internet addresses to use a few non-Latin characters, but until now, they were limited to only 37 characters. For example, internet users with little or no knowledge of English had to type in Latin characters to access websites in Chinese or Arabic.

Regional manager for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Baher Esmat believed that website addresses entirely in Arabic won't be the only factor responsible for bringing more people in the Arab world online, reports ITP.

According to the latest figures by Internet World Stats, there are nearly 48 million internet users in the Middle East, representing slightly less than 3% of the world's online population. "Think about the millions of people in the Arab world who are yet to come online," Esmat mused. He added that Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) won't solve all of the internet access problems in the region.

He stated, "As access becomes more affordable in the Arab world, and with more Arabic content made available online, [domain names] will be complementary to such developments to help the majority of the Arab population have easier means to use the Internet."