(MENAFN) According to reports, officials from UAEnic (United Arab Emirates Network Information Centre), which is the local Internet registry and (.ae) CCTLD (country code top level domain) administrator, met with top officials from ICANN (Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers), Khaleej Times reported.

The meeting was held to exchange views on the progress made by UAEnic and to discuss mutual areas of cooperation to benefit the Internet community across the UAE and the Region. UAEnic manager and Chief Technical Officer of ICANN were among the top officials who attended the meeting.

However, during the meeting, UAEnic gave the members of the ICANN delegation insights into the IDN (Internationalised Domain Names (IDN) initiatives in the region and particularly the testing of Arabic domain names. UAEnic initially started working with counterparts in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Oman to develop domain names in the Arabic language. Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Jordan are the other countries which have joined the testing initiative, set to expand further with more countries joining in.

From the ICANN side, IDN Program Director briefed the UAEnic team about the recent developments in terms of the progress made in testing internationalized labels as the top level domains in the root server system.