At its six-day 36th International Public Meeting in Seoul, South Korea, this week, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will deliberate on the proposal pertaining to the extension of web addresses in non-English characters.

The proposal, which will be voted upon at the meeting, will hopefully pave the way for an initial limited use of "International Domain Names" (IDN) - in scripts like Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and a few others - in entire web addresses by this year-end.

With the introduction of full web addresses in non-Latin scripts, which at present is allowed only in part addresses, people writing non-English languages will be able to surf the Web in their respective languages.

Noting that the IDN program is essentially aimed at reshaping the global Internet scenario, the ICANN president and CEO, Rod Beckstrom, said: "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."

Beckstrom's further statement that the proposed change is necessary not just for the present Internet use but for the future as well, is corroborated by statistical evidence - which shows that out of the 1.6 billion worldwide Internet users, over 50 percent use languages with non-English character sets!