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.

Also, as part of the Yahoo’s push to boost access in Arabic, Yahoo will offer its mail and messenger service in Arabic next year. Many of these new online users will need webpage content and will soon desire more content that is in their native language.

Having said that, remember that much of these users are from countries with a “developing” status which has other challenges, some as simple as literacy. Some challenges that Internet companies will face in some of these nations will center around their hosting of content deemed by some governments as subversive.

Sharia law based societies and governments will place new challenges on the way content is viewed, delivered, received and read in these new arenas. The unavoidable crossing of paths with western cultures online, is sure to provide for some interesting debate and potential conflict.

Other challenges, ranging from monetary constraints to restrictions on civil liberty can be seen by the announcement in Iran that officials were utilizing special police units to crawl Web sites for political material and prosecute those deemed to be spreading lies.

Consider the influence that the internet had in mobilizing Iranians, as well as informing the rest of the world about the country’s disputed presidential election in June.
Some security experts have warned that allowing internationalized domain names in languages like Arabic, Russian and Chinese could make it more difficult to fight cyberattacks, including malicious redirects and hacking.

ICANN however, dismisses this concern. ( www.icann.org ) Icann has maintained this stance in the past, and we have seen phishing, and squatting variant attacks increase in light of this past position. Metamend has developed ORM strategies see our case study here >>
Also, according to ICANN, six countries submitted applications for domains in three languages; Chinese, Arabic, and Korean. For now, registration is limited to domains controlled by national governments, with endings like .us or .cn or .uk, which currently account for about 40% of all Web sites around the world.

Here is the Twitter feed or “tweet” about it: http://twitter.com/ICANN

How does this affect us in the SEO world?
For now, its not an issue, but only a concern for the future. How pervasive this will be is wholly dependant on the popularity of these new native language only sites and the potentially viral nature of this new content.

In additon, how Google, Yahoo and Bing will rank these new offerings will be of importance. I know currently there is no real provision for this, but given Yahoo’s enthusiasm for this new development, and the tenacity of Bing’s desire to innovate, can this development be far behind?