With only 0.3% of its population wired to the net in 2002, Syria lags far behind all its Arab neighbors. The number of Syrian web sites is still very low, not numbering more than three hundred, the country has no real web portal to speak of and until  December of 2001 , no e-commerce site. ¹⁶

Still, as in many other sectors of its stagnant economy, Syria's Internet industry is trying to catch up with its regional competitors. The telecommunication ministry has announced a plan to raise the number of Internet lines to 400,000 by the the year 2004, the government plans to license the hundreds of web cafés that have mushroomed in the country in the last 18 months and an increasing number of private actors are entering the scene and starting to develop new products.

Launched in December of 2001 by Castalia, a web development company based in Aleppo, “Gifts to Syria” (http://gifts.syriagate.com/), is Syria’s first online shopping site. E-commerce for consumers started only with $250,000 of sales for 2001.¹⁶ Still, the number of Syrian web sites is still very low, not numbering more than three hundred; the country has no real web portal to speak of.

The major problems that face the diffusing of the E-commerce and E-business are the payment system in Syria. Cash has been Syria’s major payment method; there is a small use of paper checks as well. Credit Cards offered to the local market in the early 2003, and they are not widely spread yet, besides that they are only used in the local currency. That is also the reason for having the majority of people using the internet for browsing the World Wide Web only. The high cost of using the internet might play as another obstacles to the spreading of E-commerce.

The most IT industry in Syria is the Oil industry. I think the reason for that is that all the companies in that industry are joint venture between the Syrian government and foreign companies, such as Shell or Elf. These foreign companies demand a special level of information technology that they bring with them or force the Syrian government to provide or invest in it.

The Syrian top level domain name is SY. In July of 2002 the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment (STE), the Syrian operator attached to the ministry of communication, has been granted authorization by IANA to assign names under SY domain. The subdomains names that has been adopted from the STE are. edu.sy, gov.sy, net.sy, mil.sy, com.sy, org.sy...etc. There is a registration cost of $60 per year for one domain name.¹⁷