It was proposed a few months ago that the use of non-latin characters should be allowed in domain names to mean that countries who don't use the latin character-set an use domain names in their own characters. After a few months of consideration ICANN have now approved the use of "foreign"characters and may be offering domains using this new system later in the year. Apparently the first TLD's to use this new system will be in Arabic and Cyrillic.
Some people have complained that this will herald a more complicated Internet, but I don't think that is true. If you're native tongue is Arabic and have never learnt English then I think the existing system would be an awful lot more confusing than the ability to type in domain names using Arabic characters. This opens up the Internet to being a more interesting and culturally diverse place where the English language (or other languages using latin characters, such as French, etc.) isn't a requirement.
I hope maybe this may be a sign that more companies will be more accepting of other languages and cultures. However there have been some initial concerns that the use of similar characters in domain names (if you can mix and match character sets) it may open up the Internet to far more phising possibilities. Some people have also commented that if TLDs are added for other languages should the same also happen for programming languages?
