The Internet Corporation on Assigned Names and Numbers recently decided to allow for the issuing of non-Latin domain names. Previously all countries were forced to use the ASCII character set, including countries whose native language included non-ASCII characters.

To aid in the transition, ICANN devised a micro-language of sorts to allow a smooth transition between ASCII-only domain names and the more robust Unicode domain names (which allows for non-Latin characters). This micro-language is known as Punycode.