Three Mideast countries have become the first to get Internet addresses entirely in non-Latin characters.
Domain names in Arabic for Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were added to the Internet's master directories on Wednesday, following final approval last month by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. It's the first major change to the Internet domain name system since its creation in the 1980s.
Registrations for Web sites to use those names are to begin soon. On Thursday, Egypt granted three companies approval to register names using the country's new Arabic suffix.
Until now, Web sites had to end their addresses with ".com" or another string using Latin characters. That meant businesses and government agencies still had to use Latin characters on billboards and advertisements, even if they were targeting populations with no familiarity with English or other languages that use the Latin script.
Non-Latin characters were sometimes permitted for the portions of the Internet address before the suffix. But Arabic Web sites generally haven't had that option because Arabic characters are written right to left, conflicting with Latin suffixes written left to right.
"Introducing Arabic domain names is a milestone in Internet history," Egyptian Communication and Information Technology Minister Tarek Kamel said in a statement. "This great step will open up new horizons for e-services in Egypt" as well as boosting the number of online users and enabling Internet service providers to enter new markets by "eliminating language barriers."
ICANN, which cleared the way for non-Latin suffixes in October after years of debate, said the Mideast shows growth potential, with just a fifth of the populations online, on average.
Egypt will keep its ".eg" suffix in Latin and will offer ".masr" in Arabic alongside that. Masr is the country's name in Arabic. Kamel said TE Data, Vodafone Data and Link...
Posted: 2010-05-10 07:19:25
