LatinTLD is advising registrars of a sunrise period for internationalised domain names for the .ar (Argentina) ccTLD.

The advice reads:

Dear Registrars:

Sunrise for Argentina’s IDN will be carried during a 100 day period from September 8th to December 16th 2008.

All those who have an “ASCII” (non-IDN) domain registered before July 31st 2008 will be able to request their equivalent IDN domain name containing any of the following Spanish and Portuguese characters.

1. The characters “á” “â” “ã” or “à” will be convertible from the letter “a”.
2. The characters “é” “ê” or “è” will be convertible from the letter “e”.
3. The characters “í” or “ì” will be convertible from the letter “i”.
4. The characters ” ó” “ô” “õ “or “ò” will be convertible from the letter “o”.
5. The characters “u” or “ü” will be convertible from the letter “u”.
6. The character “ñ” will be convertible from the following combinations “n”, “nh”, “ni”, “nn”, “ny”, “gn”.
7. The character “ç” will be convertible from the letters “c” and/or “s”.

For example: if a Registrant has registered papa.com.ar prior to July 31st 2008, then this qualifying domain can be used by the Registrant to apply for papá.com.ar . After the application, the registrant of a qualifying domain name is free to keep or not the qualifying domain name, although keeping it is recommended by NIC.ar

IDN domains applied for during this period will have to wait for their approval until they are granted, this is, from Wednesday December 17th 2008 onwards. IDN domains will not be usable (DNS) until granted to the applicant.

From December 17th, 2008 until March 16th 2009 inclusive, NIC Argentina will process and approve the applications. Once this domain granting period is finished, NIC Argentina will announce, at least 15 days in advance, the date IDN registrations will be available to the general public (commencement of the Landrush stage).

If there is more than one application for the same domain, which can only happen to those IDN domains that include the “ç” and/or the “ñ” characters (e.g. both corasao.com.ar and coracao.com.ar qualify to apply for coração.com.ar, but only automovil.com.ar qualifies for automóvil.com.ar), the Registrant of the qualifying domain that was registered earliest before July 31st 2008 will be granted the IDN domain.