The first three non-latin country code top level domains to go live in the root according to ICANN’s blog, are:

السعودية (“Al-Saudiah” – Saudi Arabia), امارات. ( “Emarat” – UAE) and مصر. (“Misr” – Egypt)

You can view a functioning, full IDN website (Egypt Ministry of Communications) at this address

وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر

Congrats to the first three countries to go fully IDN, we’ll certainly be keeping an eye out for the ones to follow and, most importantly, we’ll be anxiously awaiting for the internationalization of the gtlds to signal the completion  of the true multilingual internet.

The thing which concerns me, judging from many of the comments to the various blog posts and domain forums, is that many domain investors seem to be clueless as to what is really happening, or too lazy to read the documents themselves, waiting for someone to spell it out for them.

Well, since I’m a nice guy, let me oblidge.

All your IDNs are belong to us.

Seriously though, how hard is it to comprehend?

Here it is in layman’s terms without all the technical stuff.

Starting November 16th, countries around the world will be able to apply for and receive  a cctld in their language[s].

Example for the ADD-affected. Russia will apply for .рф which is the Cyrillic acronym for Russian Federation [Российская Федерация].

This is it in a nutshell. Simple, isn’t it?

Now, in order to disspell some fears and misconceptions and answer questions

Q. Why is this happening?

A. Just because. Actually, contrary to popular belief, most people around the world don’t speak English, or are not necessarily familiar with the Latin Alphabet. They need to read and interact in a script which is familiar to them.

Q. It will fragment the internet

A. We’ll use internet defragmentation for that. Fact; IDNs -second level- have been around since the year 2000. [IDN.com Idn.net, etc] Really. Tons of IDN domains have been registered since then with thousands of sites in existence, alive and kicking. That’s 9 years ago. Has the internet fragmented in your trailer park yet? Just watch out that the sky doesn’t fall on your head.

Q. What does all this mean for me?

A. Nothing, really. Well unless you’ve invested in IDNs, in which case you stand to make a decent buck in the coming months. It does mean a lot though, to billions of people around the world whose ability to surf and conduct business on the web, has been limited up to now, because they had to do it in a language they don’t understand.

Q.  But, the domains will be in a language that I don’t know and I can’t type on my keyboard so how will I get there? This is crazy.

A.  We don’t want you to go there. We’ll gladly take the millions of Chinese/Indian/Arab/Russian users who will know how to get there. That’s the reason ICANN is making IDN cctlds available. To keep you out of the loop.

Q. Foreign governments will use this as a tool for propaganda and control.

A. You Freedom Fighter, you. They can do this already with their ASCII ccTLDs since most of them are government controlled. Why would IDN ccTLDs make it any different than it is?

Q. Foreigners will use this as a tool for phishing attacks.

A. I say you’re right about that one. And, since phising attacks have been happening since the start of the internet, lets disable all ASCII domains too. Problem solved.

Someone, turn out the lights.