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Web Addresses: Now Fully in Arabic


The internet just got a little less Anglo-normative:
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.

Some urls already feature other scripts, but this is the first time the country codes can also be in a language other than English. Apparently, people at Icann were worried that "people would start creating their own internets, where it was only in Chinese, Arabic, Thai or whatever," and this will help prevent that by making the internet more compatible with other languages.

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