For the first time in history of the internet, addresses without Latin characters have been launched. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates are among the first countries to get the upcoming “country codes” in Arabic script. It will also be given for Chinese, Thai and Tamil users to use the internet in their own language.

Rod Beckstrom, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), President termed this a historic move and mentioned that a lot of behind the scenes work is responsible for this measure.

About 20 countries have already sought approval for international domains from Icann. China was the first country to develop systems that made it possible to enter a web address in Chinese. It noted that there is still some time before non-Latin scripts can be properly integrated into Internet infrastructure and cannot work on all the computers.

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WAM Abu Dhabi, 26th May 2010 (WAM) — The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) will launch by the end of May a new Arabic content domain (.emarat), becoming the first Arab country to obtain the approval of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’ (ICANN). (.emarat) (.������) will be the official Arabic top level domain for the United Arab Emirates.

Mohamed Nasser Al Ghanem, Director General of the TRA, told the media today at the Emirates Palace ICANN has chosen the UAE to become the first Arab country to launch its Arabic domain name for the availability of the technical requirements and its ultra-modern telecommunications infrastructure. Rod Beckstrom, ICANN CEO was present at the press conference.

The move is part of TRA’s strategy to support and enhance Arabic content on the Internet and has been made under the new directions of ICANN, the international corporation responsible for managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses, which allows the use of languages other than English as an equivalent to the domain names for countries. emarat” is the Arabic equivalent for the currently used domain name “.ae”.

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Internet should have more local content in regional languages: ITU

There is a need for more local content in regional languages on the Internet, a report by International Telecommunication Union (ITU) 2010 has said.

The report said that the web, which is still dominated by English language, need to change as the proportion of English-speaking Internet users is declining.

The report, jointly prepared by the ITU, Unesco and the WHO, was released today at the World Telecommunication Development Conference (WTDC) 2010, being held here.

English is spoken by just 15 per cent of the world population and non-English speakers are increasingly growing online. Another indication for the diversification of content on the Internet is the growing number of websites that are registered under country domain names.

Some of the highest 2005-09 growth rates in terms of newly registered domain names were found in India (.in), Russia (.ru) and China (.cn),” the report said.

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