ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has today made the decision to allow the use of domain names containing non-Latin characters. This is one of the biggest changes that has been made to the Internet since it was created 40 years ago yesterday.

The decision means that users will finally be allowed to register web addresses using scripts such as Hebrew, Hindi and Korean, bringing an end to the Latin-alphabet monopoly on domain names.

But don’t get too excited thinking about how you can use the 100,000 new characters! This new generation of multilingual domain names will not be available until mid-2010.