.com In Arabic? This is Now a Reality!

"If English is your first language, you probably take it for granted that all website suffixes - the .com's, .org's, .gov's and the like - come nicely packaged in Western characters, like the ones you're reading now." Sci Tech Blogs states.

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If you only spoke Russian, Chinese or Arabic, well then you had a problem.

All of those languages make use of a completely different alphabet. And, until this week, none of those alphabets could be used in place of the '.com' portion of an internet address."

This was, as you might think a big problem. This limitation made using the internet hard for billions of people. With the new suffixes, the internet will become a lot more accessible to billions more people.

"Now they can. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced this week that the first sites with all-Arabic Web addresses are now online.

'This isn’t just a minor change for the Internet, it’s a seismic shift that will forever change the online landscape,' Rod Beckstrom, CEO of ICANN, said in a written statement issued Thursday.

'This is the beginning of a transition that will make the Internet more accessible and user friendly to millions around the globe, regardless of where they live or what language they speak.'

The first of these internationalized suffixes is the Arabic form of ".masr," which means "Egypt."

Egypt's internet suffix now will look like this: .eg or .مصر

The Arabic characters read right to left." Sci Tech Blog stated.

You may not think that this is such a big deal if you grew up speaking a Western language, but if you think about it from the other perspective it might be easier to understand. Imagine if you wanted to type in the web address for Google.com but instead of typing in .com you had to type in .com's equivalent in Chinese or something like that. If you don't know Chinese that would be pretty troublesome for you.

You might not even have access to Chinese characters on your computer.

"White said the switch is part of a long, technical transition to include non-Western characters. The foreign letters first showed up in the main piece of a Web address - so the "CNN" rather than the ".com." But completing the transition is important, he said.

So far, Chinese and Russian characters haven't been included. But 21 countries have applied to have domain name suffixes in 11 different languages. So you'll likely see more of these popping up online soon."

This is a huge change in the internet and will take some time to be accepted fully, however, this will most definitely help get the internet more accessible to more people from all around the globe.