Egypt launches world’s first Arabic web domain

Communications minister Tarek Kamel said the new domain name would be “.masr” written in the Arabic alphabet. It translates as “.Egypt”.

Last month, internet regulator Icann voted to allow non-Latin web addresses. Domain names can now be written in Arabic, Chinese and other scripts.

Mr Kamel, who was speaking at the start of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) being held in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, said a formal announcement would be made on Monday.

Registration for addresses with the .masr ending would begin at midnight (2200 GMT), he said.

Egypt currently has 15 million internet users out of a total population of 80 million.

BBC News

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Tags: Domain name, Internet Governance Forum, Sharm el-Sheikh

This entry was posted on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 3:53 pm and is filed under Modern Egypt. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.