ATHENS: The organisation that manages the Internet's technical core on Wednesday said it was running tests to determine whether countries can register web addresses in their own language, an option expected to further boost the Internet's global appeal.

But the move was not without risk, as misapplication of the feature could result in the web breaking up into unlinked components, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said.

An increasing number of users from different countries have been requesting the right to register domain names -- online addresses such as .uk and .fr -- in their native languages, in order to open up access to the Internet to users who cannot write in English, said participants in a four-day UN forum on Internet governance, held in the southern Athens suburb of Vouliagmeni.

ICANN on Wednesday said it was conducting laboratory tests to see whether it would be possible to accept internationalised domain names (IDNs), and was expecting to reach a resolution by the end of 2007.

“The Net is now expanding in countries where people are not familiar with the Latin alphabet,” Nitin Desai, special advisor to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Internet governance, said.

“There is a lot of pressure for the internationalisation of domain names from countries such as China,” he said.—AFP