Internationalizing the Internet
Coming soon to an Internet near you: top-level domain names written in Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Russian, and several other languages. As of yet, no announcement of full implementation has been made, but ICAAN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has announced that testing will begin on this idea. So far, non-Roman alphabets can be used in second-level domains, but the final bit in a URL must still be .com, .org, .net, etc. - or one of the country domains assigned to each country.
This is an interesting idea as it opens the world a tiny bit more to hundreds of millions more non-English-speaking people. But at the same time it opens the door for new scams people can pull by taking similar characters in differing alphabets and attempting to fool unwary users.
(via Ars Technica)
