As the number of Arab Internet users, Arabic web pages and Middle East online businesses have been exponentially increasing in the last few years, a newly found consortium finds a need, which may go beyond satisfying national pride, to institute domain names in pure Arabic text.
The Jordanian capital will at the end of this month be the launch venue for the Arabic counterpart of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the non-profit international organization that rules over the Internet domain names system. The Arabic Internet Names Consortium (AINC) will have a main task of standardizing a coding for domain names in Arabic characters set.
Industry experts and top executives from a number of Middle East and US-based Internet and IT companies, especially those involved in the technology and registry of Arabic domain names have signed up as founding members of AINC, which will have its first official meeting in Amman on March 31 under the patronage of King Abdullah II.
The non-profit organization says that it will seek to facilitate the
"internationalization of the Internet for all Arabic speaking people of the world, allowing access without linguistic barriers at all levels." Its objective is to coordinate efforts to develop and deploy Arabic Domain Names system and applications, thus providing users with the capability of using Arabic language and its standard characters set to write domain names in Arabic and navigate the Internet.
"AINC’s main objective is to Arabize domain names, as the present domain names system accepts only Latin letters. The Arabic language will become, later this year, one of the few languages that could be used for registering domain names, together with other international languages," says Talal Abu-Ghazaleh, AINC chairman and chairman of Talal Abu-Ghazaleh International.
"We are expecting that later this year, it will be possible to have an Arabized program, which will be installed on the computer to allow it to translate the Arabic character to ASCII that will be understandable by the DNS."
Consortium (MINC) has already prepared its requirements and it will be implemented by IONS and Network Solutions Inc. (NSI) the registry of the Generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs). A number of companies will introduce technologies for the Arabic Domain Names during an Internet Arabization seminar that will accompany AINC’s meeting.
One of the technology providers that will make a presentation in the seminar is the US-based NativeNames.net, which claims that last month it was able to develop the first truly working server-based Arabic domain name registration technology. The solution works on the core DNS and can co-exists with the current system without any disruption.
The company says that the solution is capable of supporting multilingual domain names across all commonly used Internet protocols like http, ftp, email, and telnet complying with the ASCII Compatible Encoding (ACE) and fully supporting UTF-5, UTF-8, CIDNUC, SACE and other local encoding. “By offering multilingual Internet protocols, NativeNames.net seeks to bridge the gap that has hindered Internet access for non-native English speakers of the world,” says Jarallah Aljarallah, COO and cofounder of NativeNames.net.
Welcoming the efforts to Arabize domain names, Abdul Kader Kamli, editor-in-chief and general manager of the leading Arabic portal Ajeeb.com, says the move will give an alternative for Arabic speakers, but that it should not run against the trend of globalization.
“Domain names in Arabic text would be useful for many Arab Internet users, but web sites using it should also have a domain name in Latin letters to insure they could be easily accessed by the largest number of users wherever they were,” he said. “Having the option to type the URL address in one’s native language is part of the democratization of the Internet,” he added.