According to Mashable, the first non-Latin domain names have been issued by ICANN. The three issued domains are all in Arabic.
Screenshot from Mashable:
I doubt the majority of Americans will be impacted by this change. After all, the people likely to visit a website whose URL is in Arabic or Cyrillic or Chinese probably already speak the language. And in terms of national security, I don’t think it will be an issue since people in the intelligence community who monitor Arabic websites will be able to make sense of the URLs.
Where it could be an issue, though, is for the average user who doesn’t speak a non-Latin language. As Gizmodo and others have already pointed out, they pose a greater phishing threat. But even for legitimate sites, will there be a way to translate the URLs into Latin characters for non-native-speaking users, similar to Google’s “translate this page” feature?
I guess the rule of thumb for such sites is that unless you can speak (or at least read) the language, don’t go there.
(Also interesting to note how many Arab commenters on Mashable say that Arabic domains are unnecessary and will only cause confusion. Therefore it makes me wonder how many of these we’ll actually see other than from official government sites and extremist groups.)
