I do not consider myself a xenophobic ugly American. I am not one of these English-only types that cringes everytime I see a sign in two or three languages or gets excited everytime Congress makes noise about making English the official national language.

ICANN (the people who regulate domain names and web site extensions, like dotcom and dotinfo) has passed what it's calling the "Internationalized Domain Name Fast Track Process", which will allow a long list of non-latin alphabet characters to be used as domain extensions.

This means you could be doing business globally with sites ending in Chinese or Farsi or Arabic characters, for example.

I guess the West is getting some of its own back in this decision in all fairness.

For purely selfish reasons, I dread this (I have no idea how to type in Japanese characters).

I'm sure that I'm not alone in this.

Here's what I predict will happen:

- Any web site that does business with Westerners will have an all Latin alphabet address that redirects to their site anyway.

- This goes into effect sometime next year. Google will undoubtedly have something in beta by then to translate extensions into the Latin alphabet.

- Microsoft Office won't have alternative alphabets in its font offerings. But it will still have Wing Dings, which is of no use to anyone.