I know but some people think english keywords are useless in non-english countries. Here we have an Indian based company in Dubai selling a .ae english domain, with seven serious bidders and hundreds of phone calls to the seller.
Also from the article: âPeople just grabbed hundreds and hundreds of domains like shopping.ae, store.ae, hospital.ae. Theyâve already gone.â
The end of the article says: "under the new system, a user will be able to register a domain in either English or Arabic script." IDN have their place for sure, but if you look at facts, ascii domains sell well and are used in pretty much all countries. You want to market to locals only then fine get IDN domains, but you shut out tourists, foreign workers, etc. which may or may not matter depending on your business. ASCII keyboards are more universal. And if you go for IDN, do you choose IDN.com, IDN.cn, or IDN.IDN if you are for example in China?
Even look at the domain the article is on,
www.thenational.ae