CAIRO: Egypt announced it is looking to move Arabic online. The country's information technology minister said at the opening of the Internet Governance Forum – a United Nations-sponsored that has drawn legends such as Yahoo, Jerry Yang and Tim Berners-Lee – that Egypt will apply for the first Internet domain in Arabic in an effort to boost online access in emerging markets, such as North Africa and the Middle East. The new domain will be “.masr”, or literally “.egypt” in Arabic. Differentiating it from other domains is that it will be written using the Arabic alphabet, not the typical Latin letters of the “.com.” If successful, Egypt will be the first Arabic speaking nation to achieve an all Arabic Internet. Minister Tarek Kamel said that the initiative is part of the country's push toward broadening access to Arabic speakers. He said that the vast majority of Egyptians, and many Arabs in general, are unable to use the Internet without Arabic access. Kamel added that by registering it “will offer new avenues for innovation, investment and growth, and hence we can truly and gladly say the Internet now speaks Arabic. “It is a great moment for us,” Kamel said of the domain opportunity. The move for the new domain comes from a late October decision by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to establish a “fast-track” mechanism for domain names in non-Latin character based languages such as Chinese, Arabic, Korean and others. The hope from Cairo is that the new Arabic domain will help improve connectivity among Egyptians and other Arabic speakers across the region. Kamel said the belief is that by adding the domain, it will allow more Arabic content to be generated, which has been limited due to the Latin characters. However, despite the efforts, a number of analysts and observers are not sold on the idea. While they say it will certainly increase Arabic generated content, it will do little to curb the rising censorship that has left the region fraught with uncertainty. “What we have to see is how much government will be into this project. If it is just their initiative and then will open it up to private users and their websites, then it will be great, but if it tries to keep control of the content it will be a government instrument to censor and trap users,” said Ayman el-Din Said, a European-based web technician. “We have to watch and see. It is a good idea initially and when we look at it, it really could bring in millions of users who haven't felt comfortable as of yet to use the Net. It will give many more jobs to the region,” he added. The Middle East and North Africa is a top priority of Internet companies, including Yahoo, which purchased Maktoob.com, an Arab online community website earlier this fall. Yang told the conference there are over 300 million Arabic speakers across the globe, but only one percent of online content is in the language. He added that Yahoo plans to bring its mail and messenger services to the Arabic speaking world next year, but did not say when exactly that would occur. Either way, the Internet in the region is still in its infancy. Less than half of all Egyptians use the Internet on a regular basis. The market remains wide open and companies like Yahoo have seen this, analysts argue. “They know the importance of the Internet for the region and the fact that there is a long way to go, so it only makes sense to have an all Arabic domain. Whoever gets on this now, will make a lot of money,” said Mohamed al-Anany, who works at an Egyptian-based Internet company. “It might be too early to tell really what is going to happen, but it is exciting.” BM
