Three Mideast countries have become the first to get Internet addresses entirely in non-Latin characters.

Domain names in Arabic for Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were added to the Internet's master directories yesterday, following final approval last month by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. It's the first major change to the Internet domain name system since its creation in the 1980s.

Registrations for websites to use those names are to begin soon. Today, Egypt granted three companies approval to register names using the country's new Arabic suffix.

Until now, websites had to end their addresses with ".com" or another string using Latin characters. That meant businesses and government agencies still had to use Latin characters on billboards and advertisements, even if they were targeting populations with no familiarity with English or other languages that use the Latin script.

Non-Latin characters were sometimes permitted for the portions of the Internet address before the suffix. But Arabic websites generally haven't had that option because Arabic characters are written right to left, conflicting with Latin suffixes written left to right.