We last provided an update on the IDN ccTLD Fast Track back in August. Since then, India, Iran, and Korea have passed the string evaluation phase and are lined up to be delegated by the end of this year.

India is applying “.bharat” in Hindi, Urdu, Telugu, Gujarati, Punjabi, Tamil, and Bengali. Iran applied for “.iran” in Persian (Arabic Script), and Korea has applied for “.korea” in Korean (Hangul Script).

The end of October will mark one full year since the IDN ccTLD Fast Track Program was approved by ICANN. Today, 28 strings have passed the string evaluation phase, 10 of which are in Arabic. The delegation of 15 strings spanning 12 countries has also been completed since the program began; recent additions to the root zone include Jordan, Palestine, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, and Tunisia. View the current status of known applications below.

Operational IDN ccTLDs

The UAE Telecommunications Regulatory Authority opened the two-month long Sunrise Registration Period for .emarat on October 17th, 2010. Meanwhile, the Saudi Arabian Arabic ccTLD has just began the Landrush Phase of its launch schedule. Finally, the Registry for the Russian Cyrillic Top-Level Domain, .РФ, has announced that global registrations launch under the IDN ccTLD will start on November 11, 2010.

The table below shows the status of applications which have been publicly released.

Current Status of IDN ccTLD Fast Track Applications

(Only applications which have passed String Evaluation are public)

• IDN ccTLD Fast Track Update – August 2010
• IDN ccTLD Update – March 2010
• ICANN 38 – Opening Day
• First IDN ccTLDs Pass String Evaluation
• IDN ccTLDs to Launch in 2010