(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Making the Internet more accessible around the globe, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (www.icann.org) has opened the domain application process to non-Latin characters for website addresses with its inclusion of internationalised domain names. Egypt’s communications minister said Egypt will be leading this effort as the first country to open an Arabic language Internet domain, according to a BBC report.
After years of intense technical testing, policy development, and global co-operation, ICANN rolled out the groundwork for the first Internet addresses containing non-Latin characters from start to finish thanks to the ICANN board’s approval of the new Internationalized Domain Name Fast Track Process last month.
An Associated Press report notes that Egypt, Russia, and four other applications have applied for country code top level domains in their scripts. Bulgaria has also reportedly applied for a ccTLD in Cyrillic script, according to local reports.
“It’s an historic moment,” ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom told an Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Egypt’s Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, according to AP. “Of 1.6 billion [Internet users], more than half are born using languages that do not use Latin scripts, so this means that for more than half of users today of the Internet, they will be able to type domain names entirely in their own language.”
