May 7, 2010 by James Oliver
In quite a historic move for the web, for the very first time in its history, non-Latin characters are now in use for top-level domains.
The first nations to benefit from this are Egypt, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
The news came as a result of an ICANN process known as the IDN ccLTD Fast Track process which started in October 2009.
To date 21 requests for IDN ccLTD (Internationalised Domain Name Country Code Top Level Domains) have already been received and 13 of these requests have passes through the second of three stages of the process.
The first three countries mentioned to have passed the application process were accepted and delegated into the DNS root zone this week. This means that they are now readily available for general use which makes Arabic Abjad the second script after Latin to be available for use in domains on the internet.
It is not yet clear as to whether this change will spark a mass scramble for the best domains in the Middle-East.
As an evidently emerging market it is highly likely that sites will want to buy not only their brands but domains that are identical to high traffic search engine key phrases.
As this change has only come about in this last week other details such as how the domains will be obtained and distributed are still pretty sketchy at present.
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