At the 36th Annual Meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ("ICANN") on October 30, 2009, the ICANN board finally approved the new Internationalized Domain Name ("IDN") Fast Track Process. IDNs have been a topic of discussion since before ICANN's inception. It has taken years of intense technical testing, policy development, and global cooperation to prepare the Fast Track process for its launch. On November 16, 2009, ICANN officially opened the IDN Fast Track Process to allow countries that use non-Latin based languages to also apply for top-level domains that reflect their country's name in local scripts such as Chinese, Korean, Arabic, etc.
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