Exciting buzz among IDN advocates and watchers was created this week when ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom Tweeted the following from the special ICANN Meeting of the Board on April 22nd (PST): “ICANN board approves Internet top level int’l domain name (IDN) delegations for Russia, Egypt, UAE & Saudi Arabia.”

Since ccTLD IDNs were approved at the ICANN Board meeting in Seoul, South Korea in October of last year, government agencies interested in securing their own Internationalized Top-Level domain have been adding their requests. You can see a list of all prior requests in a previous blog entry. ICANN only makes public strings which have passed String Evaluation. The full list of all strings made public by ICANN can be found here:

http://www.icann.org/en/topics/idn/fast-track/string-evaluation-completion-en.htm

This is the first round of several new IDN ccTLDs that users can expect to see operational in the next year or so.

Currently 13 requests that have passed the String Evaluation phase, with the most recent being Jordan (.الاردن) on April 22nd. We expect to see more strings approved for delegation in the coming months, perhaps to be announced at Brussels.

We are looking forward to watching these pioneers in action as they work to popularize their strings and deal with the many issues associated with IDN TLDs.