Domain names

LA Times, ICANN to let thousands of domain names bloom, 21 Jun 2011 "The group that governs Internet domain names is opening up the system far beyond the 22 existing suffixes so that companies and organizations can apply to create their own versions of .com, .org or .gov."

So, what price .islam or .quran? I'd imagine there would be an intense contest for these suffixes, if they ever became available.

Khalifa.emarat

ameinfo.com, World's first Arabic address website launched by UAE, 23 May 2010 "The UAE's Presidential Affairs Ministry has launched the world's first Arabic address website: Khalifa.emarat. The UAE is one of four countries in the world which have been allowed by the Internet Corporation Assigned for Names and Numbers to use the internet domain in its mother tongue. The UAE government announced last year its plan to launch .emarat - the Arabic equivalent of the .ae domain name for the country."

It may have been launched, but Khalifa.emarat was 'under construction' when I visited.

ICANN and business

David George-Cosh, The National, Arabic language makes the internet its domain, 6 May 2010 " ...Dubizzle, an online classified advertisement website that receives more than 33 million page views a month, said it would have its entire website translated into Arabic as early as next month.

"JC Butler, the co-founder and managing director of Dubizzle, said the company had spent the past nine months building several features that would allow advertisements to be automatically cross-listed in English and Arabic."

See Dubizzle

Arabic net

BBC News, 'Historic' day as first non-Latin web addresses go live, 6 May 2010 "Arab nations are leading a "historic" charge to make the world wide web live up to its name.

"Net regulator Icann has switched on a system that allows full web addresses that contain no Latin characters."

Also see ICANN blog, First IDN ccTLDs now available "Today the first three production non-Latin top-level domains were placed in the DNS root zone. This means they are live! Here is one newly enabled domain with a functional website that works right now: وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر

ICANN IDN ccTLD Fast Track String Evaluation

AP/Arab News, Saudi Arabia gets approval for Arabic Web address, 21 Jan 2010 "An announcement on Thursday by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, known as ICANN, paves the way for an entire domain name to appear in Cyrillic or Arabic by the middle of this year. Applications for strings in other languages are pending."

Also see the more technical article (and eye-catching headline): ICANN, First IDN ccTLDs Requests Successfully Pass String Evaluation, 21 Jan 2010 "ICANN is pleased to announce the successful completion of the IDN ccTLD Fast Track String Evaluation for four (4) proposed IDN ccTLDs. The requests are associated with: Egypt, the Russian Federation, United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia."

Egypt and the net

Reuters, Egypt puts archives on Web to boost Arabic content, 14 Dec 09 "Egypt has begun making its national archives digitally available on the Internet in Arabic, having last month registered the world's first domain name in Arabic script."