Archive: November, 2009

Recently the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or ICANN, opened registration for non-Latin script domains.

The nation of Egypt reports that it is has registered the first all-Arabic domain name.
The Egyptian Information Technology Minister Tarek Kamel stated that his government had filed an application to register the domain “.masr” which denotes “.Egypt”and is written entirely in Arabic.

Having worldwide users unfamiliar with Latin characters using the internet, has been a regular and long standing discussion, taking six years of negotiation and technical work just to get ICANN approval. On Oct. 30, 2009 in a legendary descision, ICANN voted to allow for Web addresses be expressed in characters other than those of the Roman alphabet.
This move has not taken everyone by surprise however, as Yahoo recently acquired Arab online community Web site Maktoob.com, in advance of the ICANN ruling. Seeing that there are over 300 million Arabic speakers in the world, and the fact that less than 1 percent of the content online is in Arabic, there certainly seems to be an opportunity here.