Being able to use kanji, hiragana and katakana for Web site addresses would not greatly enhance convenience for Japanese because many are familiar with English and search engines such as Yahoo and Google already enable searches in Japanese, Internet industry experts said.
In response to strong demand from China, Arabic nations and other countries that do not use the Latin alphabet, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers decided Oct. 30 to allow the use of non-Latin alphabet characters in domain names.
ICANN executives, who said Net users could see non-Latin alphabets in use as early as next year, have hailed the decision for making the Internet accessible to many more people.