Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have become the first three countries to get Internet addresses in non-Latin characters, being approved in Arabic this week by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
Registrations for websites using the new domains will start soon, and Egypt has already given approval to three companies to use the new Arabic suffix.
“Introducing Arabic domain names is a milestone in Internet history,”says Egyptian Communication and Information Technology Minister Tarek Kamel said in a statement. “This great step will open up new horizons for e-services in Egypt as well as boosting the number of online users and enabling Internet service providers to enter new markets by eliminating language barriers.”
Until the recent decision, all websites had to end with “.com” or “.org” among other strings using Latin characters, which could get confusing for nations with no familiarity with the characters.
ICANN noted that the middle east has only about 20 percent on their populations online, on average, a far cry from the over 60 percent seen in most developed nations.
Additionally, a suffix for Russia in Cyrillic is expected to be the fourth new domain accepted soon. By the end of 2010, suffixes for Jordan, Qatar, Tunisia, Palestine, Hong Kong, Thailand and Sri Lanka are also expected to be approved.
Result for: internet service providers
Lord Mandelson has announced this week that the UK will in fact be adopting the highly controversial ‘three strikes’ Internet piracy law, disconnecting multiple time offenders from the Internet while levying heavy fines.
The government added that first time offenders will likely be given a warning, then have their bandwidth restricted after a second offense. Third strike means being disconnected from the Internet, or at least “considered” for disconnection given the crime.
The law will come into effect April 2010, says the Department for Business, Skills and Innovation. Ofcom will be in charge of monitoring the file-sharing of UK citizens.
UK ISP TalkTalk, a strong critic of the bill, came out swinging after the announcement: “What is being proposed is wrong in principle and won’t work in practice. In the event we are instructed to impose extra judicial technical measures we will challenge the instruction in the courts.”
When asked about the material losses for ISPs given disconnection from the Internet for their subscribers, Mandelson added: “I have no expectation of mass suspensions. People will receive two notifications and if it reaches the point [of cutting them off] they will have the opportunity to appeal.”
Another staunch critic of the plan, the Internet Service Providers’ Association believes that copyright holders should be in charge of all costs related to the system, and that ISPs should be reimbursed for all lost customers.
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Result for: internet service providers
In an Open Letter sent to The Times last week, the heads of the major Internet Service Providers (ISP) in the UK, as well as representatives of the Open Rights Group, Which? and Consumer Focus, all protested to the plans to disconnect “repeat offenders” of P2P piracy from the Internet.
“Consumers must be presumed to be innocent unless proven guilty,” the letter read. “We must avoid an extrajudicial ‘kangaroo court’ process where evidence is not tested properly and accused broadband users are denied the right to defend themselves against false accusations.”
The letter acknowledged the industry’s legitimate concerns about illegal sharing of copyrighted material, but still said the government’s proposals for dealing with the issue are “misconceived, and threaten broadband consumers’ rights and the development of new, attractive services”.
“Without protections, innocent customers will suffer. Any penalty must be proportionate. Disconnecting users from the internet would place serious limits on their freedom of expression.” The proposal to disconnect file-sharers came from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) in late August.
BIS suggested that ISPs should pay a large amount of the costs of monitoring usage and for the legal mechanisms needed to decide which file sharers should be disconnected from the Internet. The open letter claimed that these costs, mounted on ISPs, would need to be passed on to customers, most of whom never use P2P software for piracy.
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