TRA confirms Arabic .emarat for 2010

The UAE’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority has confirmed it will release Arabic-script .emarat (.امارات) domain names by the second quarter of 2010.

The move, which we anticipated a few months ago, is part of a move by Icann, the nearest thing the net has to a regulator, to introduce non-Latin scripts to the internet’s addressing system – which is no mean feat.

“Our objective is to support Arabic content over the internet and build a strong identity for UAE and Arab countries across the World Wide Web,” said Mohamed Naser Al Ghanim, director-general of the TRA, in a press release.

“We encourage all companies and entities in the UAE to register for .ae and .emarat as it represents their local business identity and brings their country pride,” he added.

The TRA has also been pushing the Latin-script .ae domains in a recent marketing campaign across the UAE. It would now seem a simple matter to roll in .emarat promotion as well.

This will be an extremely major milestone in the short history of the public internet, and could – if everything works and people actually use the new domains – mark the moment when it becomes a truly international phenomenon, not confined to a single, Western, script.

Or something.