It’s rare for domain names to make the mainstream news. But it happened recently, with news that by mid-2010, the first domains in non-Latin scripts should be up and running.This means we will start to see domain names in scripts like Chinese, Cyrillic and Arabic. Up till now, domains have only been able to contain Latin characters – and that has excluded the billions of people across the world who never use the Latin alphabet.The change, voted for by the ICANN board (who control the internet’s domain name system) is intended to help open up the internet to everyone, creating a system which allows every computer online to communicate with every other.Countries like China have already introduced ways of using non-Latin characters in domain names, but these are generally technical fudges which aren’t compatible with the internet as a whole. These changes will work universally – across the entire internet.One step at a timeThe new addresses will not come on-stream all at once. To start with, the change will only apply to country code top level domains (like .uk) which are controlled by national governments. This is a fundamental change to the domain name system, so phasing it in does seem the best way of making sure everything works properly.As these changes should help make the internet more accessible to people whose languages aren’t written with the Latin alphabet, the long-term effect should be that far more people are able to access and understand the internet. As they come online, we may well see lots more websites appearing that don’t use the Latin alphabet at all.What does it mean for business?Because this has never been done before, it is hard to predict exactly how it will affect businesses which use the internet and trade online. However, it is likely that companies will have to work harder to protect  their brand on the web.This change will naturally lead to more domain extensions and give companies alternative ways to write their own brands. Look at Google’s China site for instance. Will they have to register domain names in Chinese (in Chinese, it looks like “Google” is “??”) as well as in Latin? Will they have www.??.com in addition to www.google.com?If so, this could lead to increased cybersquatting (it will become even harder for websites to keep track of all the domain names they need to guard their brand) – and, of course, the cost of registering and administering all the additional domains could be a headache too.Having said that, it’s not to say this big change is a bad thing. The web has been skewed towards those of us who use the Latin alphabet for a long time. If we want it to be a truly global communication tool, it needs to cater properly for people who use different alphabets. Although this may involve some extra cost for business, it will certainly bring extra opportunities too.Whatever you think, it isn’t something you need to worry about immediately. The first non-Latin domains are still more than six months away. And with the phased introduction, it’ll be a while before you need to worry about someone cybersquatting on your brand’s Cyrillic domain name.For more on this check these articles on the BBC and The Guardian – or search ICANN’s website for the full details, straight from the horse’s mouth.