The announcement by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in late 2009 that they will be accepting non-Latin script for domain names marked a milestone in the history of the World Wide Web. Said Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s president and chief executive, “We just made the Internet much more accessible to millions of people in regions such as Asia, the Middle East and Russia.”

Such domain names will be known as Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) i.e. domain names that include characters other than the letters of the basic Latin alphabet (the 26 letters “a-z”), numbers 0-9, and hyphen “-”.

That’s certainly a good move, considering that two of the world’s largest populations (and fastest growing markets), China and India, have unique scripts for their mother tongues. See table of 80 largest countries and those with non-Latin script below.

The first non-Latin scripts approved so far (February 2010) are Arabic and Russian, and soon to follow are Hebrew, Hindi and Korean. ICANN estimates that about 50 such names are likely to be approved in the next few years.

Should B2B marketing managers be concerned? How will it impact their websites?

FAQs on Trademarks & Registrations

Q: Will holders of domain names in Latin automatically have the rights to the same url in non-Latin script? What will be done to protect those with established domain names?

> Ans: According to ICANN, that ‘will be determined by each country or territory since IDN country code top-level domain (ccTLD) registration policy is set by each country and not by ICANN’.

Q: How will domain name registrations be monitored? Will we still be able to use the same vendors?

> Ans: Please refer to the operators of individual IDN country code top-level domains, as they will determine the processes and rules around registering second-level names. Their contact details can be found on this ICANN chart.

Q: How do we keep track of the approved applications or updates?

> Ans: Simply refer to the latest updates on the ICANN approved IDNs chart or sign up for ICCAN’s RSS news feed.

Other implications for global B2B marketing mangers

All these answers however, still do not address all the other questions facing B2B companies.

While the international language for most B2B businesses is English and there may not be a need to create websites in multiple non-Latin script to match their non-Latin urls, there are still other important implications with IDNs.

For example, one could assume that company urls with Latin script/alphabets such as www.ibm.com should not be affected, but what about companies with names such as American Express?

American Express’s url could end up looking like this: РФ.АмерикэнЭкспресс in Russian or like this: مصر.أمريكان اكسبريس in Egypt. In which case, it is certainly advisable to register your own company IDN in multiple non-Latin scripts to safeguard your brand. And that’s just the start of one’s worries.

Here are just some of the other questions B2B marketing managers will need to advise their CEOs on.

Email Marketing

• Will it make sense for your colleagues in Russia or the Middle East to use their own script for their email addresses as well?
• How can we ensure that our clients and business associates recognise such emails and not reject them as spam?
• How will spam filters treat such emails? What standards will be set for e-mail applications?
• How will you manage your contacts database across different regions?

Marketing Administration

• What will be the cost of updating all the collateral your company’s non-Latin website/s will appear on, and over what period?
• Which non-Latin websites will you decide to feature on your marketing programmes and which will you ignore?
• What about all the links on your Twitter accounts, LinkedIn profiles etc?
• How happens when a non-Latin language is written right to left?

Website Optimization

• Will search engines recognise one type of url over another for the same website?
• How will search engines treats links to a website with multiple domain names?

Indeed, it will be interesting to watch how international companies will respond to the brave new world of non-Latin domain names.

Tell us what you think the implications of non-Latin urls will be for your organization. Leave a comment below (under table).

TABLE: Non-Latin Script used by the world’s 80 largest countries