Egypt and China have stated they will be the f irst to apply for internationalised domain names as part of ICANN’s fast track process. ICANN begins accepting requests for the new TLDs on 16th November 2009.

Egypt is planning to launch “the world’s first Arabic language internet domain”. Egypt’s communications minister, Tarek Kamel, has said that the TLD (top level domain) would be “.masr”, written in the Arabic alphabet, which translates as “.Egypt”, say the BBC.

China’s application is reported by the China Daily who says that the China Network Information Centre (CNNIC) will also apply for a Chinese TLD. The report says CNNIC will apply for the TLD “Zhongguo”(written in pinyin). There are over 388 million net users in China according to Qilin, assistant director of CNNIC in China Daily.

ICANN President Rod Beckstrom described the importance of this change to the global Internet community, by saying “over half the Internet users around the world don’t use a Latin-based script as their native language. IDNs are about making the Internet more global and accessible for everyone.” Once approved, the new internationalised TLDs are expected to come online during 2010.

This week, the internet regulator ICANN approved plans to allow non-Latin-script web addresses. It is a move that is set to transform the online world.

The board of Icann voted at its annual meeting in Seoul to allow domain names in Arabic, Chinese and other scripts. More than half of the 1.6 billion people who use the internet speak languages with non-Latin scripts. It is being described as the biggest change to the way the internet works since its creation 40 years ago. The first Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) could be in use as early as next year.

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