The recent Arab Top Level Domain Names Steering Committee Meetings held in Damascus, Syria, saw the appointment of Mr. Ahmed Al Doseri, the representative of Bahrain’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) as president of the Committee that comprises representatives from the Kingdom of Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen.
This Committee is tasked by the League of Arab States with the direct supervision and follow-up on the League’s application for the domains (.arab) and the equivalent in Arabic (.عرب).
TRA’s ICT Manager Mr. Ahmed Al Doseri, who chaired the steering committee meeting, commented, “The creation and use of a “.arab” or Arabic equivalent domain will ensure greater regional identity and over time will help to bridge the digital divide by encouraging Arabic content development and ease of navigation for those people who only read and write in Arabic.”
The international body that oversees internet names, Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers and Names (ICANN), announced in November 2009 that it will accept applications for non-Latin alphabet domains. This will bring the Internet much closer to the diversified locales of the world’s varied cultures.
Mr. Aldoseri also said “Bahrain will soon enjoy an Arabic domain (.البحرين), which will further contribute to overall Internet penetration in the Kingdom, and support the creation of local digital content.”
Egypt was the first Arab country to apply to get its own Arabic domain name (.مصر), followed by the UAE for (.امارات).
The steering committee is next scheduled to meet in Egypt during the period from the 24 to 28 January 2010 to follow-up on the agreed action points of its last meeting, and report on the progress of the League of Arab State’s application for Arabic domains.
for clarification:
– the process that already start concern only the ccTLD IDN or in plain english the country code like dottouness and so on. the number of total application is 16 with several arabic countries and not only egypt. in fact, egypt claimed to be the first applicant because they made press conference during Internet Governance Forum held in Shamr elSheikh in 16th (the day when the application process started) and there was the CEO of ICANN attending the forum. for remind it is only an application, we don't know yet which arabic country will first run an arabic domain name as the process called fast flux is still on going http://www.icann.org/en/topics/idn/fast-track/
as far as I remember, Tunisia, Egypt,UAE and Saudi Arabia applied
– the process for dotarab as new generic Top level domain name and its equivalent in arabc IDN are different (but somehow linked and ordered). until now, there is only “Expression of Interest” process which is just aimed to know prospective applicants for new gTLD and doesn't mean that the new gTLD is accepted (http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtld-program… and http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcem… ), the process itself is still under public comment in ICANN community.
– the dotarab IDN is depend to the progress of new gTLD process (which is probably not going to start this year).
– in fact the involvement of arab league is late for the dotarab initiative let us hope that is going to be like other “successful” arab league projects 🙂
We will finally get rid of all those weird domain names like fun4areab or afun.
Thank you for the extra information and clarifications Rafik. Very useful to know.
We'll see about that, let's just hope that at least we won't be seeing as many Arab sites with domains that have numbers substituting for letters in them, there's something in those that bugs me, I don't know why.
You have a massive post. I am delighted to be a part of this. Thanks for updating me.