Egypt to apply for first Arabic domain name

Arabic Domain Name System (ADNS)

Arabic DNS has been largely debated as one of the most urgent issues which constitute a considerable hurdle against the development of Internet use in the Arab world. Several workgroups were formed in order to bring a solution to this problem, and two Internet drafts were lately issued as one extra step towards a standard solution. The first draft was issued by ESCWA, it contains a set of guidelines that are in coherence with the IETF IDN standard and take into account some Arabic-language specific issues just as recommended by ICANN and by Dr. Al-Zoman research work. The second draft was issued by the Arab Information engineering task force (AIETF).

Given that an Internet draft is usually a first step towards a standard solution, the evolution is conditioned by the consensus of the concerned community about the correctness of the implementation and the consistency of this solution with the international standards. These drafts can therefore be considered as the basis of a discussion bringing together the concerned stakeholders, and given the emergency of the issue and the proliferation of non-standard solutions (a more politically-correct term would be “vendorspecific standards”), the evolution should be solid and quick.

This document aims at clearly defining all the “ingredients” needed to define and implement a successful, workable ADN solution, which would be accepted by all Arab countries. In this context, it should be definitely seen as a “work-in-progress” document, which should evolve towards a final, exhaustive and complete document. The final document would contain a clear list of all the issues, classified by nature, with the different solutions and approaches, the adopted solutions and the reasons behind this adoption. Achieving this status requires a broad participation of all the concerned people, including those who issued the first Internet drafts.

Hence, this document contains mainly a reiteration of the list of issues which need to be addressed in order to resolve the ADN problem, most of them are mentioned in the Internet drafts, but some of them are not.  The list of issues mentioned here may grow vertically to present the discovery of new issues we failed to detect initially, or horizontally to present the different solutions brought to a particular problem We do not endorse any particular solution at this moment, as we believe that the solutions should come as a result of the discussion and the consensus. We just mention the solutions suggested by the RFC draft (and remember that it is a draft, which means that all the solutions mentioned inside are merely proposals which need to be studied, evaluated, and eventually accepted as is or amended or eventually replaced). Needless to say that any suggested solution needs to be compatible with international standards and rules adopted by the IETF and ICANN, and in particular the set of IDN standards as defined in RFC 3490- 3491-3492.