An interesting thing happened last week. Scarily enough it was brought to my attention, not from my usual RSS feeds, but rather from my sister, who usually runs screaming from phrases like SEO and online marketing.   She was listening to NPR on her drive home from a weekend trip when a news story came on about the recent approval of non-Latin characters in domain names.  After hearing this news, I immediately did some research and found some articles related to what the future holds for international domain names and international online marketing.

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced on October 30, 2009 that they have approved the introduction of domain names containing non-Latin characters. These domain names will be called “Internationalized” domain names (IDN’s) and, according to Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s President and CEO, “This is only the first step, but it is an incredibly big one and an historic move toward the internationalization of the Internet.”

Prior to this change domain names were restricted to Latin c