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The internet is on the brink of the “biggest change” to its working “since it was invented 40 years ago”, the net regulator Icann has said.

International domain names or addresses that can be written in non-English characters are expected to be approved this week.

This will spark one of the biggest changes to the internet in its four-decade history.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN – the non-profit group that oversees domain names – is holding a meeting this week in Seoul.

The ICANN board will decide if will allow entire internet addresses to be in scripts that are not based on Latin letters.

This could potentially open up the web to more people around the world as addresses could be in characters as diverse as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic – in which Russian is written.

Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic characters will soon appear in your browser address bar

The change will address the fact more than half of the 1.6billion internet users worldwide use languages based on alphabets other than Latin.

‘This is the biggest change technically to the internet since it was invented 40 years ago,’ Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board, said.

The first Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) could be up and running by “mid 2010″ said the president of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann).

“Of the 1.6 billion internet users today worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not Latin-based,” said Rod Beckstrom at the opening of Icann’s conference in Seoul, South Korea.

“So this change is very much necessary for not only half the world’s internet users today but more than half, probably, of the future users as the internet continues to spread.”

Icann, set up by the US government, was founded in 1998 to oversee the development of the net.

Last month, after years of criticism, the US government eased its control over the non-profit body.

It signed a new agreement that gave Icann autonomy for the first time. The agreement came into effect on 1 October and puts it under the scrutiny of the global “internet community”.