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Report from BBC Monitoring:

Before the meeting, ICANN President and CEO Rod Beckstrom said: "This is an extremely important meeting for ICANN, since the IDN programme is moving one step closer to reshaping the global internet landscape. In Seoul, we plan to move forward to the next step in the internationalization of the internet, which means that eventually people from all corners of the globe will be able to navigate much of the online world using their own native language scripts".

The decision will reform both generic top level domain names (gTLDs) and country code top level domain names (ccTLDs), starting with the latter. ICANN coordinates TLDs worldwide with the aim of ensuring that each internet address is unique. Some examples of top-level domain names are endings like .com, .org, or .net. Examples of country-code top-level domain names include .ru for Russia, .ir for Iran, or .af for Afghanistan.

Up until now, all country-code domain names have required Latin characters.

Beckstrom said that, in the future, internet addresses would need no longer use limited top-level domain names and would be able to use more flexible IDNs such as ".post" or ".bank".

Applications by countries for ccTLDs under the IDN Fast Track Process endorsed by the Seoul meeting will begin to be accepted from 16 November, Beckstrom said, and the first entries into the system would likely come sometime in mid 2010. The use of new IDNs will eventually be expanded to all types of internet address names, he said.

After the meeting of the 15-person ICANN board which unanimously endorsed the change, Beckstrom declared: "We have just made the internet more accessible to millions of people in regions such as Asia, the Middle East and Russia."

He said that the move emphasized that the internet belonged to everyone, no matter what language they speak. "The internet is about bringing the world together and this will facilitate that effort," he said.

Peter Dengate Thrush, ICANN chairman, said the introduction of IDNs came after years of study, research and testing. "To see this finally start to unfold is to see the beginning of a historic change in the internet and who uses it."

And Edward Yu, CEO of Analysys International, an internet research and consultancy firm based in Beijing, said the news was "delightful". It meant the internet would become accessible to millions of users with lower incomes and education standards, he said.

Many countries had been lobbying ICANN for some years for such a change, and some, like China, have partially disengaged themselves from ICANN, creating Chinese versions of .com, .net and .cn domain names.

But the Chinese internet creates an "island effect" that "does not favour businesses that want to communicate and sell products and services to the rest of the world," said Steve DelBianco, executive director of NetChoice, a coalition of trade associations, e-commerce businesses and online consumers.

It was possible that the next 2 billion internet users would not speak Latin-based languages, and it was only fair that the domain name system should allow them access to the internet in languages they understood, he told Computerworld magazine.

Critics of the move to IDNs say that the ICANN reforms could have the opposite effect from that intended, renewing fears of fragmentation of the web and the erosion of its global, albeit US-regulated, character, a process sometimes referred to as Balkanization of the internet. The creation of "walled gardens" in the internet ecology could ultimately be fatal to the spirit and current practice of the "world wide web" as a civilizing influence, they argue.

In an April 2008 post on the ZDNet technology website, editor-in-chief Larry Dignan warned that "the openness of the internet could fall to nationalism." He added: "On paper, ICANN's plan makes sense. However, the unintended consequences need to monitored." Around the same time, Columbia University Law Professor Tim Wu was quoted by the Wall Street Journal as saying: "We are facing a step-by-step Balkanization of the global internet. It is becoming a series of national networks".

The move has also been criticized for risking the emergence of "language ghettos" inaccessible to computer users who lack the correct character sets or keyboards. It is anticipated that many sites will retain Latin character addresses to alleviate the problem. Sites will still be accessible to technically savvy users who know the numeric internet protocol address, or via a translation solution that is available, but remains expensive for the time being. However, many experts believe that users will find their own solutions.

Beckstrom has acknowledged that "the idea of multiple internets is a potential threat", but he believes that the creation of IDNs, together with multi-stakeholder sharing by the international community of global internet governance under a new regime agreed in September, will counter it to the advantage of all.

Some media freedom groups such as Reporters Sans Frontieres are sceptical. The temptation for authoritarian governments to opt for online environments with more localized language-specific webs that they can monitor, control and police could be too great, they argue.

Under the 30 September agreement by the United States Department of Commerce (DoC) to end its oversight of ICANN, the organization is now "independent and not controlled by any one entity", and will come under a more internationalized control structure, of which the DoC will be just one member.

The Seoul conference welcomed the Affirmation of Commitments document that embodies the new international status of ICANN. The document had also endorsed ICANN's rapid action plan for IDNs.

France and the European Union both welcomed the long-awaited change in global internet governance. French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said: "France has always been in favour of responsibility for guaranteeing the safety and stability of the internet not falling to a single government or a single privately-owned organization."

Swedish Infrastructure Minister Asa Torstensson, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, said of the agreement: "A global, resilient and open internet is a common responsibility. The EU looks forward to a continuous positive dialogue with ICANN, US authorities and other stakeholders, to ensure an open and transparent internet for the benefit for all internet users."

And on 7 October, Russian Deputy Minister of Telecommunications Aleksey Soldatov allayed fears of "unconnected deglobalized nets", saying that while Russia was moving towards Cyrillic addressing, there were no plans to route Russian internet traffic through centralized servers, and that there were no plans to implement screening of the internet in Russia. (BBC Monitoring research 30 Oct 09)

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