Three countries in the Middle East have become the first to get Internet addresses entirely in non-Latin characters.
Domain names in Arabic for Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were added to the Internet’s master directories on Wednesday, following final approval last month by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. It’s the first major change to the Internet domain name system since its creation in the 1980s.
On Thursday, Egypt granted three companies approval to register names using the Arabic suffix.
Until now, Web sites had to end their addresses with “.com” or another string using Latin characters. That meant businesses and government agencies still had to use Latin characters on billboards and advertisements, even if they were targeting populations with no familiarity with Latin script.
Non-Latin characters were sometimes permitted for the portions of the Internet address before the suffix, but Arabic Web sites generally haven’t had that option because Arabic characters are written right to left, conflicting with Latin suffixes written left to right.
Egypt will keep its “.eg” suffix in Latin and will offer “.masr” in Arabic alongside that. Masr is the country’s name in Arabic.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates will offer their countries’ names in Arabic.
A suffix for Russia in Cyrillic is expected to be added to the master list soon, having received ICANN’s final clearance last month as well.
Proposals for several others have received preliminary approval. They include suffixes for Jordan, Qatar, Tunisia and the Palestinian territories in Arabic, Hong Kong in Chinese, Thailand in Thai and Sri Lanka in Sinhalese and Tamil.
ICANN said it has received a total of 21 requests for such domains representing 11 languages since it began accepting applications in November.
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