gaining ground in the Middle East?
Although the Arabic language is booming and is one of the fastest growing languages in the world, it still faces problems of access online. In 2013, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) implemented domain names in Arabic, Chinese, German, Russian, and Cyrillic scripts. When Russian and Chinese top-level domain names grew by leaps and bounds, Arabic domain names and the United Arab Emirates country code top-level domain (ccTLD) (.emarat), the equivalent of the Arabic domain extension .AE, .Al Saudia for Saudi Arabia and .Misr for Egypt did not grow as a result and did not fill the gap 39 between Arabic content and the Arab user. Top-level domains are letters after the last period in a domain name such as .com, .ae, and .net, while ".Shabaka" (Arabic for .web) was the first new Arabic Level Domain (TLD) first. for the world. Leading industry experts have said that the main reason is due to the lack of Arabic content online despite the growth of the Arabic-speaking population. "The other reason is universal acceptance. Most online banking and e-commerce platforms accept emails in ASCII or Latin characters and do not recognize Arabic or Chinese email address id. People go and sign up for Arabic domain names but there is a limitation on how they could use domain names because the domain application of a domain name is email and if you want to use your email id in your local language and if you can't then So that's a problem," Middle Tech Baher Esmat, ICANN's vice president for stakeholder engagement in the Middle East. Despite great efforts by ICANN and in-country domain administrators to spread awareness about these areas, Munir Badr, founder and CEO of AEServer, one of the registrars for TRA-accredited domain names for .ae, said that The general public and businesses generally prefer to use English Common Domain Extensions because they are much more popular, easier to write and use. all and, in some cases, it costs less to register than IDNs. Esmat said that some countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council, with the exception of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Iraq, Sudan and Somalia. , they have a large Arabic-speaking population and mainly use the Arabic language on their mobile phones and social media. From ICANN's perspective, he stated that the organization's role is to ensure that domain names operate in a secure and stable manner.
(Image credit: future)
Internet penetration rate in the Middle East
"When communities around the world ask ICANN to create domain names in different languages, ICANN must accommodate their needs. Whether or not domain names work is up to ICANN or our responsibility," Esmatsaid said. According to ICANN, the largest national domain names, in terms of registrations, are China and Russia. "Where we have millions of domain names in China and Russia, we have less than 1,000 Arabic TLDs in Saudi Arabia and other GCC countries. This could change as our region is the fastest growing Internet usage region in the world. ", said. According to Internet World Stats, the Middle East had 258.37 million inhabitants in April last year and 175.50 million of them are Internet users, which corresponds to 4% of the total number of Internet users worldwide. The Internet penetration rate in the Middle East is 67,2%, higher than 56,5% in the rest of the world and higher than the world average of 56,8%. According to Ethnologue, Arabic is the fifth most spoken language in the world in 2019 with 319 million after Chinese, Spanish, English and Hindi. Badr said the low usage is mainly due to a lack of interest from registrants. "If you look at Dubai in general, the language of business is English and with a large expatriate population, many business decision makers are knowledgeable in the fields and have prior experience using a generic domain name like .com or .net or country-level domains (ccTLDs) to opt for a .ae name and a .com name as a package and both in Roman script," he said. On the other hand, he said that .ae is one of the top performing domains in the Mena region with more than 230,000 registered domain names and that it is extremely popular in the UAE United Arab Emirates and that it is also cost-effective and easy to register. . However, he claimed that there was a lack of awareness and that no big or well-known brand or government agency used such domains.
Need to raise awareness
“If many brands use Arabic and English domain names on their billboards, the community will follow this trend. People in the UAE in general are very trendy and like to set and follow trends,” Badr said. However, he said that most of the companies here target residents in English, Arabic and the other language in a common language that everyone understands in the UAE and that is English.So, he said that there is no need to create Arabic domains with a web page Arabic. In addition, he stated that those who have an Arabic section on the website usually have a subdomain or section on the main website for Arabic speakers. Furthermore, he said that Arabic words and letters also have "variations" in the sense of that the same letters with different vowels sound differently, so everything has to be taken into account.The .emarat domain name system allows every Arabic domain name to have variants registered for free. "The government (TRA/aeDA) itself did an excellent job of raising awareness when the .emarat domain name was first revealed, in particular by placing an advertising billboard on the main streets of Dubai. However, it is 'the end user' "who prefers to have a single domain name for their website and chooses an option that is suitable for everyone," he said. Badr said that ICANN creates roundtables and discussions and brings different stakeholders together at events like the Middle East Domain System Forum that takes place every year. This year it will be held in Riyadh in March 2020, he said, adding that the forum will address various topics, including universal acceptance covering international domain names (IDNs). Another organization addressing these issues is the Asia Pacific Top Level Domains (APTLD) Forum which was held in Dubai last year.