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).
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The IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) ccTLD Fast Track Program was approved October 2009 in order to allow the inclusion of characters other than the traditional ASCII characters used in Country Code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs). The implementation of IDN top-level domains has been in the works for several years, seven in the ICANN community alone. ICANN, the organization which oversees the Internet’s name space calls the implementation of IDN TLDs the biggest change to the underlying structure on the Internet since its inception.
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6
MAY
Just a few short weeks after ICANN approved the first IDN top-level domain name delegations at its Meeting of the Board on April 22nd, the first strings, Egypt, UAE, and Saudi Arabia have been entered into the DNS root zone. The three strings were added to the root today (May 5th PST / May 6th JST), making the IDN strings officially operational.
The strings entered into the DNS root zone are:
| Country | IDN String | Latin Script Equivolent |
|---|---|---|
| Egypt | مصر. | .misr |
| United Arab Emirates | امارات. | .emarat |
| Saudi Arabia | السعودية. | .al-saudia |
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:
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Earlier this year, ICANN announced the first four strings which had passed the String Evaluation phase — Egypt, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Russia (Russian Federation). Now, as of March 24th, a total of eight (8) strings have passed string evaluation and are awaiting approval for delegation. The strings that are awaiting a decision on delegation are listed below.
19
MAR
As we look ahead to the next ICANN International Public Meeting this June in Brussels, we thought it would be a good opportunity to take a look at some of the topics that are on the the table for public comment.
The public comment process is a crucial element in ICANN’s overall goal for transparency. Through public comment the internet community can raise issues or give consent to policies before they are decided on by the ICANN board. We encourage all perspective New gTLD applicants to let their voices be heard on these key issues.
A full list of items up for public comment can be found here. Current issues related to the New gTLD Program are which are open for public comment are listed below.
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On January 21st, 2010 ICANN announced the successful completion of the IDN ccTLD Fast Track String Evaluation for the 4 new proposed IDN ccTLDs[]. The details of the successful evaluations are provided on ICANN’s website.
This news comes just 2 months after ICANN received its first requests, and 3 months after ICANN approved the ccTLD Fast Track Process at the Seoul Meeting in October of 2009.
There has been no official word when these 4 countries and/or territories will initiate String Delegation. To date, ICANN has received a total of 16 requests for IDN ccTLD in 8 languages.
The original press release can be found here.
20
JAN
On December 21, 2009, Hong Kong Internet Registration Corporation Ltd HKIRC announced that ‘.香港’ (Hong Kong) registrations will be offered free to all ‘.hk’ customers in the second half of 2010. Their aim is to increase the popularity of Chinese domain names and to increase benefits to the Internet community. (Press Release)
This is a very exciting movement, since ‘.香港’ (Hong Kong) along with ‘مصر.’ (Egypt), ‘امارات.’ (UAE), ‘.РФ’ (Russia), and ‘السعودية.’ (Saudi Arabia) will be the first IDN ccTLDs to be accepted by ICANN through the IDN ccTLD Fast Track Program[]. The only question remaining is, who will be the first to open their doors to public registration.
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