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Egypt Registers For Arabic Domain Name
Published Nov 19, 2009
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Egypt has publicly announced its intentions to register the .misr country code top-level domain (ccTLD) shortly after the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) launched a process for internet addresses to be available entirely in Arabic yesterday.
Egypt's Communications & Information Technology minister Tarek Kamel made the announcement at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), declaring that: "Now we can really say that Internet will speak Arabic". The ccTLD .misr, which translates as 'Egypt' will be written entirely in Arabic script.
IDNs are domain names that include characters other than the currently available set of the English alphabet (the 26 letters "a-z", numbers 0 to 9, and hyphens). Under ICANN's ccTLD Fast Track Process new internet extensions that represent country names can be requested in Chinese, Russian, Arabic and several other languages.
Though Egypt has gone public with its registration, ICANN's senior IDN director Tina Dam clarified that that was a national decision and that the non-profit organisation had received several other requests from different countries.
"We received a total of six requests within the first few hours from countries/territories," Dam told "...some countries have decided to make the information public in what is a very exciting time for them. This is naturally a completely local decision."
Baher Esmat, regional head at ICANN, recently mentioned that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have shown keen interest in the process.
Being the first to send in a registration request doesn't necessarily mean that that country will be the first to go live with an Arabic IDN either. ICANN will process requests as quickly as possible but the time taken till they go into the DNS root zone can vary depending on the completeness of each request, explained Dam.
Once they have been evaluated and approved, the new internet extensions are expected to come online in countries next year.
Posted by
VMD - [Virtual Marketing Department]
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