Arab nations are leading a "historic" charge to make the world wide web live up to its name.
Net regulator Icann has switched on a system that allows full web addresses that contain no Latin characters.
Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are the first countries to have so-called "country codes" written in Arabic scripts.
The move is the first step to allow web addresses in many scripts including Chinese, Thai and Tamil.
More than 20 countries have requested approval for international domains from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann).
It said the new domains were "available for use now" although it admitted there was still some work to do before they worked correctly for everyone. However, it said these were "mostly formalities".
Previously, websites could use some non-Latin letters, but the country codes such as .eg for Egypt had to be written in Latin script.
The three new suffixes will allow web addresses to be completely written in native characters...
The Emirates country code is امارات.
"All three are Arabic script domains, and will enable domain names written fully right-to-left," said Kim Davies of Icann in a blog post.
Egypt's communication and information technology minister Tarek Kamal told the Associated Press that three Egyptian companies were the first to receive registrar licences for the '.masr' domain, written in Arabic. But I couldn't find the site live.
More information in future posts.....
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