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 A potential mess is brewing over the impending Arabisation of the internet; as new multilingual domains become reality next year, there is to date no clear-cut Arabic equivalent of ‘.com’, or an obvious organisation to administer such a domain.
A report in The National highlights this issue, and cites concerns from business owners at the current lack of clarity over what Arabic TLDs will get registered when the process opens in the new year. This follows on from an Icann meeting held in Cairo last week.
“We’re doing business in the Arab world, so we need our customers to be able to reach us in Arabic. If they don’t put .com and .net in Arabic as fast as the country-specific ones, then I’ll have to register in all 20 Arab countries to protect my rights,” said Jaser Elmorsy, CEO of BlueBridge Technologies, quoted in The National.
The problem is a potentially serious and expensive one for brand holders in the region, which all face the same issues as BlueBridge. Ironically, the problem comes out of a major freeing-up of the internet’s addressing system, which will in fact give extensive power to major brand holders.
At the start of 2009 individuals and organisations will be able to apply for bespoke internet top level domains (TLDs), which currently include generic domains such as.com, .org, and country-specific domains such as .sa or.ae.
For the first time these addresses can also be made up of non-Roman characters. Icann, the nearest thing the internet has to a governing body (and based, of course, in the US), has currently approved 22 non-Roman character sets for the new addresses, Arabic among them.
As well as non-Roman addresses, those with enough dosh and clout will be able to register their marques as TLDs. For example, we can expect obvious ones like .ebay (cited by The National), .microsoft or .pepsi to spring up pretty quickly (giving an address such as ‘www.drink.pepsi’ as a possibility).
However, as the registration process will cost $185,000 with a $75,000 annual renewal fee, and will also require an investigation and assurances that the TLD holder will be able to administer the domain – ie, make sure it works and make sure users can register addresses in the domain, if appropriate – only the largest and most committed organisations will be registering bespoke TLDs.
At the moment, as The National points out, governments are at the top of this list for the Middle East.
“This means governments are going to dominate the new space for months, if not years. This is not the promise we have been pushing for in the past 10 years,” said Steve DelBianco, executive director of lobbyist firm NetChoice, quoted in the paper.
This is perhaps a pessimistic view, but there are few obvious candidates for pan-Arab TLD administration. Organisations such as Arabic Domain Names
have been pushing for Arabic-character handling for years, but it is unclear if the group has the desire or ability to handle the practical reality of an Arabic .com.
What it does have is some suggestions for generic Arabic TLDs. Possibilities for ‘.com’ include the options ش ﺷﺮك and ﺷﺮآﺔ depending on whether a single letter, word root or full word is wanted as the TLD.
Governments (if they have any sense, anyway) are likely to avoid claiming these .com options, as this would require them to deal with queries from across the Arab world, and expose them to the politics this would involve.
More likely is the possibility of an organisation such as Google – which has not shown itself averse to taking on new business opportunities – swooping in to act as regional arbiter, in the process opening up plenty of new money-making options. Or, of course, a new player could set itself up, with relatively minimal investment, as the Arabic Icann equivalent – although it would still have to convince Icann itself it would be able to handle the pressure.
Potentially a number of players could end up offering different generic top-level domains, resulting in a bit of regional competition – which would probably be a healthy situation, at least for brand holders looking to register their domains. Even the cost of registering with three competing .com equivalents would pale compared to the cost of registering the 20-odd country-level TLD options.
And as with all things internet, one TLD is likely to emerge as the dominant player within a relatively short period. This may also depend on how successful any Arabic registrar is at dealing with issues such as cyber-squatting, censorship and the inevitable technical problems.
In the meantime, companies and marketers across the region should be keeping a close eye on the situation; applications for new TLDs will start in the new year, and the first domains should appear towards the end of 2009 – but before then, companies will need to have a clear strategy as to how they want to manage their Arabic internet strategy.
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