DUBAI - The UAE’s plan to list internet addresses in Arabic under the .emarat domain name is set to become reality in April, local daily Emirates Business reported on Wednesday, citing the country's telecoms watchdog."Countries can now apply for new top level names that correspond to country name in one of its official languages,” the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) told the newspaper.
“During this process ICANN will evaluate the criteria before approving the application such as linguistic, technical and administrative matters.
"It is expected that the whole process will take about five months from now.”
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body in charge of assigning online addresses, last month approved to allow the use of Arabic and many of the world's scripts.
ICANN approved the change in a meeting at Seoul. The programme will be rolled out in stages, starting Nov. 16 and eventually the use of IDNs will be expanded to all types of Internet address names.
Egypt's communications minister last week announced the introduction of the first Arabic domain, with registration beginning for the .misr country code top-level domain.
The TRA told Emirates Business that the .ae domain registration has already been upgraded to support registering Arabic domain names.
More than half the world's internet users do not use English or a Latin-based language as their first language, the newspaper reported.