Submissions by countries with official non-Latin script based languages - population wise the majority of the world, China, India, the Arabic nations and a whole lot of South East Asian countries spring to mind - to register TLDs reflecting their name are accepted from 16 November. The new TLDs are expected to go live next year.

For trade mark owners, this means that they have to register and watch their brands in a host of new TLDs. Commercially, the Chinese TLD may prove to be particularly valuable. If you have registered your brand in Chinese characters in China, you should probably make sure that you own the corresponding domain name in Chinese characters.

 ICANN announcement of 30 October here.