EGYPT: Arabic Web addresses expected to draw millions of new users to Internet

Arabic, spoken by about 280-million people worldwide, will finally appear in domain names and Web addresses, a development that "represents a milestone in Internet history," said Tarek Kamel, Egypt's minister of communications.

Internet users so far only have been able to use Latin suffixes in their Web addresses, a format that has been an obstacle worldwide for millions of people unfamiliar with Latin letters. Introducing Arabic to domain languages in coming weeks is expected to spur Internet use among those in Egypt and the Middle East, who will have a variety of addresses in Arabic characters from which to choose.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates will be the first to take advantage of the International Domain Names after the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers approved their proposals for IDN country-code top level domains (IDN ccTLD) late in 2009.

After six months of research and condensed IT work, users in all three countries will be allowed to apply for websites using Arabic suffixes, as the Egyptian Ministry of Communication already granted three companies (TE Data, Vodafone Data and Link Registrar) licenses to use the new domains in a trial period. The domain name for Egypt will be ".masr," which means Egypt in Arabic and will be written in Arabic.

"This development will be very important for users and companies who've always struggled to find the right addresses representing themselves or their firms in their own language," said Rod Beckstrom, the head of ICANN, during a visit to Cairo.

Beckstrom reckons that the Arab population can take pride from being able to use their own language in cyberspace. "Internet use has been rapidly expanding in the Arab world, and now it's very convenient that users will be able to use their language," he said.

Developing international domain names had been in the works for more than 0 years, after the idea was pitched by an IT expert from Zurich and later approved by ICANN. Despite the advantage of bringing Arabic domains to Egypt, there have been some concerns over the increasing censorship that will accompany the applications' process by users, as the Egyptian government will be receiving requests for the new domain names.

ICANN has so far received requests for new country codes from 21 other countries representing 11 languages, including China and Thailand. Thirteen of those were given the go-ahead.

-- Amro Hassan in Cairo

Photo: Reuters

Comments

[Ringman]

It's better way totake the local domail name for each country.
I really meant the high restriced internet censorchip.
Note. I'm from Thailand, In the present some website the content isn't based on government site was blocked by deafult.

[Jad Aoun]

Unfortunately, Egypt has no time line on when they will roll out Arabic domain names to the public. Saudi Arabia has already started accepting applications and the UAE will start the application process on September 27 (once all government websites receive their domain names). Egypt hasn't set out the process to apply for an Arabic domain name.

[roddy]

Between , idn's , .country names and private gtlds , it's gonna get crowded and it's going to be hard for the marketing machine to keep up ! .....good luck to all

[David]

This is awesome, let it spread.

[Chris]

"Developing international domain names had been in the works for more than 0 years..."

You might want to double check this fact.

[Jos Strengholt]

Arabic is not spoken by 280 million Arabs; The Arabs speak many very different Arabic languages. Their countries have adopted Arabic as the language for reading and writing. I think less than 100 million Arabs are able to use that written language proficiently, as they speak Arabic languages that are rather different from the written language.