SUPPORTING THE ARABIC LANGUAGE IN DOMAIN NAMES

Domain names are very crucial part of using Internet technology. They are still written using Roman characters regardless of the worldwide spread of the Internet. Other languages are not yet fully supported to locate resources and sites on the network. Nevertheless, using Arabic domain names is essential to increase the Internet penetration in the Arab world. Supporting the Arabic language in domain names calls for investigating and addressing a number of questions related to linguistic issues and the Arabic domain name tree structure. This document discusses these issues and offers some recommendations regarding the accepted Arabic character set to be used in Arabic domain names, as well as some recommendations concerning the appropriate Arabic generic and country code top-level domain names (i.e., Arabic gTLDs and ccTLDs).