Andre Yoskowitz
9 May 2010 22:35
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have become the first three countries to get Internet addresses in non-Latin characters, being approved in Arabic this week by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
Registrations for websites using the new domains will start soon, and Egypt has already given approval to three companies to use the new Arabic suffix.
"Introducing Arabic domain names is a milestone in Internet history,"says 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."
Until the recent decision, all websites had to end with ".com" or ".org" among other strings using Latin characters, which could get confusing for nations with no familiarity with the characters.
ICANN noted that the middle east has only about 20 percent on their populations online, on average, a far cry from the over 60 percent seen in most developed nations.
Additionally, a suffix for Russia in Cyrillic is expected to be the fourth new domain accepted soon. By the end of 2010, suffixes for Jordan, Qatar, Tunisia, Palestine, Hong Kong, Thailand and Sri Lanka are also expected to be approved.