As an American invention, the Internet has many qualities reflected by its origins. Among them is the fact that domain name addresses have to be in Latin letters. That’s fine for Europe and the Americas, but in the Middle East and Asia, they use decidedly non-standard characters in their languages and never could use them in domain names.
Until now. The ICANN has approved the use of non-Latin lettering in TLDs, starting with Arabic languages. So how do you spell ‘InternetNews.com’ in Arabic? We’re not sure, but Enterprise Mobile Today has the rest of the news.
Until this week, Latin characters were required to access a complete domain name on the Internet. That has now changed as the first full Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) are now live, enabling users for the first time ever to access websites with an entirely non-Latin character set.
The first IDNs that have been approved and are now live use Arabic characters and have been deployed for the Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates country code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs). The deployment of the IDN ccTLDs marks a major milestone for the Internet and for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) following a fast-track process that for deployment that began in late 2009 after years of discussion.