It must have been a week while I was attending one of the briefing sessions after the ministerial team visited “The Internet Governance Forum (IGF)” as held in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt.
What was it for Bangladesh being in IGF, the Internet governance lobbying ground?
The team requested ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom on the inclusion of Bangla […]
As part of its strategy to support and enhance Arabic content on the Internet, the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) has announced its plan to launch .emarat (.امارات). This step has been made under the new directions of ICANN, the international corporation responsible for managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses, which allows […]
TUNISIAONLINENEWS- With a view to making the internet more accessible around the world, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has opened the domain application process to non-Latin characters for website addresses with its inclusion of internationalised domain names.
Following Egypt’s application for a domain name in Arabic on Monday, Tunisia has also applied […]
Brand owners have been advised to review domain name watching activities after the process for transforming the Internet with internationalized domain names (IDNs) in non-Latin script opened earlier today. At midnight UTC, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) started accepting requests from representatives of countries and territories around the world for new […]
The IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process was successfully launched, as planned on 16 November 2009. It was done at exactly 00:00UTC with a very joyful count-down by the Fast Track Staff Team – followed by a wooohooo The launch went smoothly. We have since monitored the system and everything is working. As of 10pm Pacific […]
So now that the media hype over internationalized domain names (IDNs) has died down, let’s focus on the messy details of what this all means. First of all, we’re not about to see the non-Latin equivalent of .com anytime soon. Certainly not next year. There are several reason for this which I will cover in […]
As mentioned earlier, the registration of TLDs ( .рф for Russian Federation) will take place starting 16 November 2009. Afterwards, the accreditation of Second Level Domains (SLDs) will commence at the end of November. At the top of the priorities list are the Governmental institutions (eligible for free registration), trade mark owners and the administrative centres in […]
The board of directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) this week opened up the root zone for non-Latin country-code top level domains (internationalised or IDN ccTLDs). Starting 16 November, ICANN will accept applications for ccTLDs in Chinese, Cyrillic, Japanese, Korean or Arabic characters. In addition to the Chinese ccTLD .cn […]
Anyone who knows Kenya knows it is famous for tea. And while I can now get Kenyan tea online from US companies like Starbucks, Caribou Coffee or any number of other re-sellers, like most consumers I would vastly prefer to cut out the middle man and buy my tea direct from Kenyan companies. Why not?
But here’s the rub. Besides me and a significant number of Brits, who buys Kenyan tea? According to Kenya’s Department of Agriculture, after the UK the three largest buyers of Kenyan tea are Egypt, Pakistan, and Sudan. In fact, the Arabic speaking Middle East accounts for about 25% of world tea purchases.
To reach these customers directly, Kenyan tea producers really need the ability to “speak their language” on the web—to provide websites and web addresses that are all in Arabic or Urdu. However, since today’s internet doesn’t allow website names in anything but Roman characters after the dot, we’ve got to wait for ICANN to enable these Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs).
Monday night here in Seoul ICANN held a reception to celebrate the coming of IDNs for country code domains (like .eg for Egypt). It was a love fest, complete with cocktails, slide shows and commemorative t-shirts. And it’s true, ICANN should be complimented for this advance—however belated.
Still, as I sat there talking with delegates from Kenya I was struck by just how limited a victory this will be—and what a missed opportunity it is—for existing and potential e-businesses. Even to reach their best Arabic-speaking markets with an all-Arabic website, no Kenyan company is likely to go through the trouble and expense of buying IDN domains in more than 20 Arabic-speaking countries.
So where does that leave the Kenyan tea industry? If I were the Kenya Tea Development Agency, Ltd I would want to keep it simple. What I would really want is the Arabic version of the website I already have—www.ktdateas.com.
In the end the issue of IDNs shouldn’t be about linguistics or politics, but about economic growth and development, about making the Internet more accessible for the billions of new users and businesses coming online every day. Now that ICANN has committed to make IDN ccTLDs available, why not make the most common existing TLDs—like .com and.org—next in line?
If, as the proverb goes, “tea is liquid wisdom” then ICANN should have a cup or two… then get about the business of bringing global TLDs to the IDN space.
Written by Andrew Mack, Principal at AMGlobal Consulting
The Internet is on the verge of undergoing one of its most significant changes in its 40-year history. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is finalizing plans to introduce non-Latin characters such as Arabic, Korean, Greek, Hindi, Japanese and Cyrillic. Non-Latin domain names—commonly referred to as Internationalized Domain Names or IDNs—could be up and running as early as middle of next year according to ICANN. Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board, told reporters: “This is the biggest change technically to the Internet since it was invented 40 years ago… [a] fantastically complicated technical feature.”
