First Arabic Domains Join Internet

For the first time in the history of the internet, non-Latin top-level domains are available in the domain name system. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers yesterday concluded the process to insert Egypt: مصر (Egypt), Saudi Arabia: السعودية (AlSaudiah) and the United Arab Emirates: امارات (Emarat) to the central root zone.

In the three Arabic-speaking countries, users who do not speak English now can use the domain name system to locate sites by putting only Arabic characters on their browsers, writing from right to left. ICANN and technical standards bodies like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) worked for years on the political and technical issues of introducing internationalised address zones, using non-Latin scripts only for the domain names, but not having changed the top-level domain was seen as incomplete.

To speed the process, ICANN in 2009 started a fast-track application process under which so far 21 countries using 11 different non-Latin languages have applied. The Russian Federation also seems to be nearing its launch and recently Jordan completed the string evaluation process. More non-Latin names therefore are expected to be available soon.

For details and illustrations see the ICANN weblog here.