ICANN Approves the First Internet Addresses in Non-Latin Characters

5/6/2010

On May 6, 2010 three Mideast countries became the first to get Internet addresses entirely in non-Latin characters. Domain names in Arabic for Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were added to the Internet's master directories following final approval by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. Introduction of internationalized country code top-level domains was the first major change to the Internet domain name system since its creation in the 1980s.

"As of June 2010, four such TLDs have been implemented: three using the Arabic alphabet, السعودية.مصر. and امارات. (for EgyptSaudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, respectively), and one using Cyrillic.рф (for Russia). Five new IDN ccTLDs using Chinese characters were approved in June 2010: .中国 with variant .中國 (for mainland China), .香港 (for Hong Kong), and .台灣 with variant .台湾 (for Taiwan)" (Wikipedia article on Internationalized Country Code Top-Level Domain, accessed 9-2020).


 

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