The Internet’s key oversight agency is on track to start testing addresses entirely in foreign characters by November, but rules for determining which ones to permit likely will take another year or two to develop.

Individuals and companies outside the United States long have clamored for non-English scripts, finding restrictive the current limitation of domain names to 37 characters: a-z, 0-9 and the hyphen.

Addresses partly in foreign languages are sometimes possible, but the suffix - the “.com” part of an address - for now requires non-English speakers to type English characters.

The “live” tests later this year are designed to make sure browsers, e-mail programs and other applications will work well with the foreign characters, said Vint Cerf, chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

“We’ve already done the testing in the laboratories,” Cerf said as ICANN’s general meetings ended Friday in San Juan, Puerto Rico. “We’re confident that none of the infrastructure is likely to encounter a problem but you really don’t know until you are in the live environment.”

Thus, engineers are planning to feed the Internet’s domain name directories with nonsensical strings that can be removed quickly should trouble arise.

Even if they succeed, however, more work remains on developing policies on such names.