Tunisia: upcoming launch of internet domain names in Arabic
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 for a domain name, dubbed tounes.com (com.تونس) along with its .net. extension.
Observers have noted that the internet @ stems from the Arabic “ar-rouba” (the fourth), an ancient Spanish measuring unit (arrobas), also used in anglo-saxon languages. Used as such, it is also referred to as “commercial a”. Mysteriously today only the French and the Spanish languages still refer to its true origin.
In a related event, and in an interview to TUNISIAONLINENEWS, Mr Moez Souabni, the chairman of the Tunisian Internet and Multimedia Association (ATIM), said that his association was among the first to have applied with ICANN for the obtention of the extension (.med) for Mediterranean internet users, following notably the launch of the Union for the Mediterranean (UPM).
This application was supported by the Mediterranean Federation of Internet Associations, he added.
According to ICANN’s CEO, Mr Rod Beckstrom “of 1,6 billion internet users, more than half are born using languages that do not use to Latin scripts”.
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