~ Arabic domain names coming soon.

October 14, 2007 by Bakkouz
Filed under Internet

One of the Biggest Changes to the Internet is on its way, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will launch an evaluation of Internationalized Domain Names next week that will allow Internet users to test top-level domains in 11 languages, including Arabic.

“This evaluation represents ICANN’s most important step so far towards the full implementation of Internationalized Domain Names. This will be one of the biggest changes to the Internet since it was created,” said Dr Paul Twomey, ICANN’s President and CEO. “ICANN needs the assistance of users and application developers to make this evaluation a success. When the evaluation pages come online next week, we need everyone to get in there and see how the addresses display and see how links to IDNs work in their programs. In short, we need them to get in and push it to its limits.”

The evaluation is made possible by today’s insertion into the root of the 11 versions of .test, which means they are alongside other top-level domains like .net, .com, .info, .uk, and .de at the core of the Internet.

Next Monday, 15 October 2007, Internet users around the globe will be able to access wiki pages with the domain name example.test in 11 test languages — Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil.

More information on the ICANN website.

Tags: domain, domain name, HTTP, Internet, Technology, URL

19 Comments On This Post:

Qwaider قويدر on Sun, 14th Oct 2007 10:39 pm

Yeah yeah, this is the second (or third?) time they go about trying to evaluate the goddamn thing .. and so far … it wasn’t all that alluring to most people!

We’ll see how it goes, all the pretty little devices that never supported unicode will give everyone a-lot-of-headache!

Cool thing is, all the windows systems since win2k support localized top level domains! Who would have guessed!

Hani Obaid on Mon, 15th Oct 2007 12:10 am

Once this is effective, we’re going to have a gold rush on our hands as everyone rushes to get their Arabic domain names.

Even the existing sites with names in Arabish like (Ikbis) will want to get the equivalent Arabic domain name.

I saw someone today selling a silly domain name like (wakalatstreet.com) for I don’t know how many thousand JDs. Imagine what they’ll ask when they take the name of a respectible company.

Who wants to buy زين.com for 50,000 JDs?

Lalla Mira on Mon, 15th Oct 2007 2:47 pm

Why have domain names in Arabic? It sounds useless to me, really.

Hani Obaid on Mon, 15th Oct 2007 4:59 pm

Lalla,

1. Accessibility: Some of us barely speak English.
2. Pride: People like to see things in their own language
3. Availability: Most of the good English domain names have already been bought. This would be a new frontier.

Ahmed on Mon, 15th Oct 2007 6:27 pm

Quite interesting ..

But on my side I could see that ICANN is doing this as a defensive step in fact, if you use Firefox as a browser try typing any arabic name in the address bar and go for it, you’ll find that the browser itself converts the name into an English equivalent .. this could be used by anyone to book domains in Arabic .. and I do know somepeople who’ve already used it and it’s working .. but only on firefox. .. ICANN realized that and was faced with the sudden action taken by the chinese government when they declared that they’ll be having their own servers to host their own domain names .. So, ICANN took their action to protect their multi billion dollars business from all those rivals ..

Personally, I don’t like this concept .. what should I do if I want to access a french website and I don’t have french characters on my keyboard ?? how are other people supposed to visit Arabic websites the same way ??

Thanks for the post ..

Khaled on Mon, 15th Oct 2007 8:41 pm

http://www.بككوز.com is terribly hard to right, switching between english and arabic then moving to the end of the sentence.

Nizar on Mon, 15th Oct 2007 9:23 pm

http://www.الأردن.com is the same as http://xn--igbhzh7gpa.com/

try it yourself.

I think they should also give possibilities to write www and .com , .net .org in arabic inorder to make this fully work in arabic :pouty:

Adoosh on Tue, 16th Oct 2007 12:07 pm

ِAnd once it’s up, imagine how much a .Dubai domain (in arabic ya3ny) would cost!!!

Subzero Blue on Wed, 17th Oct 2007 3:13 pm

Arabic Domain Names Coming Soon…

ICANN, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers have launched an evaluation of Internationalized Domain Names this week that allows Internet users to test top-level domains in 11 languages. This evaluation represents ICANNs most import…

za3tar on Sun, 21st Oct 2007 8:47 am

I remember a while back (a very long while back), a couple of Arab scientists were interviewed on Aljazeera for having patented a technology in the US that would allow the current infrastructure to support Arabic domain names …. but i have no idea if that ever materialized.

But alas, having arabic domain names would solve this problem of accounting for vowels in englishified arabic domains such as “Ikbis” or “Zain” ….. damn non-phonetic writing system!!

I also think that it’d be a terrible mistake to have arabic domains followed by a “.com” and such …. come on .. do i have to switch the language just to write a bloody url !!

raaayed on Sun, 21st Oct 2007 9:14 pm

almzaad.net/vb :whistle: :wub:

zeidan on Sun, 27th Jan 2008 10:50 am

Domain names business can be treated as an investment, just like real estate business. Domain names have value and this value rises and declines depending on its demand. Do you know how much maney some people make for just domain parking??

Salam
Zeidan
http://www.go-jordan.com

mimo on Mon, 28th Jan 2008 8:01 pm