Egyptian Minister of Communication Tarek Kamel announced on Sunday the introduction of the first Arabic domain, in a step that would ease Internet access to millions of Arabic speakers around the world.
Starting midnight (2200 GMT) on Sunday, the registration for the .misr country code top level domain will begin, Kamel told the fourth meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) at the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
"Now we can really say that Internet will speak Arabic," Kamel said at the opening of the four-day conference. The announcement follows a decision by the US-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to end the exclusive use of Latin characters for website addresses, allowing Internet users to write an entire website address in any of the world's language scripts.
At present, all domain names - the part of the website address after the dot, as in .com and .org - end in letters from the Latin alphabet.
The IGF groups over 1,500 representatives of government, non-governmental organisations, advocacy groups and the private sector to discuss the future of the Internet. Under the banner "Creating Opportunities for All", this year's forum will discuss increasing accessibility to the Network, the development of local content and the encouragement of cultural and language diversity, the promotion of safe use of the Internet, means of combating cybercrime and managing critical Internet resources. "The voice of developing world must be heard," Sha Zukang, UN Under-secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, told the conference. "Good and democratic Internet governance is a means of achieving development for all," he said.
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