MIDDLE EAST: Will Arabic domain names help censorship, create 'cyber-ghettos'?

Back in October, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, began processing requests for domain names in non-Latin scripts such as Arabic.

In theory, this lowers the barrier for lower-income Arabic-speakers who are unfamiliar with the Latin alphabet to get online.

But for now, at least, registration is limited to official government domains, sparking fears of increased censorship and online "ghettoization."

Egypt, which was among the first Arab countries to apply for a domain names with Arabic letters, is ranked by Global Voices as one of the most repressive countries for bloggers.

Most experts agree that Arabic domain names will not enhance the government's ability to block specific websites. 

But once Egypt is granted its own domain name, local sites that wish to register with the official domain must approach the government authority, which could reject an application from say, an opposition newspaper.

"It's likely that Tunisia, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain will strictly limit which sites can be registered in their domain," Jillian York, the project coordinator of the OpenNet Initiative at Harvard University, wrote in an e-mail to The Times.

"Other countries, such as Libya, ... could see it as a financial opportunity," she added.

The popular URL shortening sites bit.ly and ow.ly are registered in Libya.

York went on to say that many Arabic speakers may choose to register their site with a different Arab country that may have looser restrictions. The greater concern for many is how businesses and institutions will maintain control over their brand without owning the phonetic or translated equivalent website in all languages.

More questions are likely to arise as the mushrooming of languages besides English on the Internet changes the very nature of the global network (Google’s Eric Schmidt recently predicted that Chinese will dominate the Web within five years). Arabic is currently the fastest-growing language online, with about 300 million native Arabic-speakers worldwide. Moreover, the huge deficit in online content in Arabic compared with the number of Arabs online, between 3% and 5% of all Internet users, suggests Arabic content will grow exponentially in the next few years.

Whether this ultimately makes the Internet a more or less inclusive place is being debated. Critics worry that the introduction of domains in non-Latin scripts will create walls between online communities where none existed before, making it harder for people from around the world to communicate.

But innovations in translation and search technology could, in fact, make those barriers more permeable. Already, applications like Google Translate allow non-Arabic speakers to scan headlines from the Arabic press.

“Bridges are going to be crossed,” said Samih Toukan, a Web entrepreneur and the founder of the Arabic portal Maktoob, which was acquired by Yahoo earlier this year.

“There will still remain a gap because people tend to gather in communities on the Internet, but the gap will be smaller.”

-- Meris Lutz in Beirut

Photo: An Egyptian user logs on in Luxor. Credit: AFP/Getty

Comments

[Dima]

This may sound like a bold plug for my blog (and I apologize if it does), but I've posted some thoughts on the subject a couple of days before this article went out. The bottom line of my thinking is: "while I do share some concerns regarding the IDNs’ potential contribution to the fragmentation of the Internet, I am not at all convinced that this is what will necessarily happen. " You can follow my line of thought in greater detail here: http://www.thinkmacro.org/2009/12/our-modern-babel/

I think this is an important discussion to have, but I tend to agree with the comment above that the article presents a partial picture.

[Eric Brunner-Williams]

Yes, .eg applied for مصر, and yes, the .eg name space is rather small, as are quite a few other ccTLD name spaces. Yes, in addition to the manual work-flow the .eg operator currently uses, there are policy requirements which reflect that government's well-known policies, as in other rentier states, which correctly should be characterized as American repressive policies, applied abroad.

Is the restriction of Arabic script, and more generally, non-Latin script, to those ccTLDs for which it is an official script of government, problematic?

As a gTLD registry operator, my answer is yes, for commercial reasons. As a well-informed participant, not wearing my operator hat, my answer is also yes, for two reasons. First, arabic script is used by the residents of more than just the 22 members of the League of Arab States, it is also used in Iran and adjacent, Farsi and Dari speaking regions. The restriction to ccTLDs cannot address the League-wide, and immigrant need for a "common arabic", nor a similar need for "farsi/dari". Second, the political speech point offered by Meris Lutz.

Finally, the headline copy editor has done this article a disservice through careless pursuit of sensational framing, and the article could benefit by a discussion of how Arabic is commonly written using Latin script, and where on earth is this "makes the Internet a more or less inclusive place" debate being conducted, as it obviously isn't being debated where we actually do the work to make it technically feasible, or enabled by policy.