Three Mideast countries have become the first to get Internet addresses entirely in non-Latin characters. Domain names in Arabic for Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates were added to the Internet's master directories Wednesday, following final approval last month by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. It's the first major change to the Internet domain name system since its creation in the 1980s. Registrations for websites to use those names are to begin soon. The Saudi Center for Network Information, which manages the country's suffixes, said registrations for the Arabic equivalent of Saudi Arabia will be held in two stages. Those for the government and businesses will begin this month, and individuals will be able to start in late September. Until now, websites had to end their addresses with “.com” or another string using Latin characters. That meant businesses and government agencies still had to use Latin characters on billboards and advertisements, even if they were targeting populations with no familiarity with English or other languages that use the Latin script. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates will offer their countries' names in Arabic. On Thursday, Egypt granted three companies approval to register names using the country's new Arabic suffix. A suffix for Russia in Cyrillic is expected to be added to the master list soon, having received ICANN's final clearance last month as well. Proposals for several others have received preliminary approval and should be activated by year's end. They include suffixes for Jordan, Qatar, Tunisia and the Palestinian territories in Arabic, Hong Kong in Chinese, Thailand in Thai and Sri Lanka in Sinhalese and Tamil. ICANN said it has received a total of 21 requests for such domains representing 11 languages since it began accepting applications in November.
