IDN ccTLD Delegations approved by ICANN

This is a very brief blog post with quite the big content. Last week was a special week at ICANN, with several IDN milestones meet. Many were included in the 22 April 2010 ICANN Board meeting. The ICANN Board approved the first IDN ccTLD delegation requests for four countries. These countries are: Egypt, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. This means that we will soon start seeing domain names ending in: مصر, рф, امارات , السعودية

The ICANN Board also took actions that are expected to expedite Chinese characters in top-level domains as part of the IDN ccTLD Fast Track. This will be the first set of variant IDN ccTLDs to be introduced – under special circumstances. More work is underway on the subject of variants, including policy-procedural analysis and technical definitions and plans for testing.

In addition, last week, a new IDN ccTLD request was announced as having passed the String Evaluation stage – for the country of Jordan. This means that Jordan now may enter the String Delegation step, which is the last step in the Fast Track Process. As such Jordan joins 13 other countries/territories having succesfully passed String Evaulation. The full list can be seen here: http://www.icann.org/en/topics/idn/fast-track/string-evaluation-completion-en.htm

The total number of received requests in the Fast Track Process is: 21
The total number of languages represented is: 11

To read more about the IDN ccTLD Fast Track, go here: http://www.icann.org/en/topics/idn/fast-track

If you only see boxes in the above IDN ccTLDs, then you may need to download the necessary font: http://idn.icann.org/Fonts – or perhaps you are experiencing a problem with IDNs that is not rendered correctly when viewed in various applications. Either way we’d love to hear about it.


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