ICANN’s Board of Directors approved the delegation of four new internationalized domain name ccTLDs last Thursday. These approved country code domains include Russia, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Egypt.
An internationalized domain name (IDN) refers to domain names that contain non ASCII characters. These domain names offer the ability to use characters from non-English languages within domain names, allowing non-English speaking users to register domain names in their native languages.
The following delegations were announced by the ICANN Board:
- Russia will have the .рф (xn--p1ai) (“R.F.”) domain delegated to the Coordination Center for TLD RU.
- Saudi Arabia will have the السعودية (xn--mgberp4a5d4ar) (“Al-Saudia”), domain delegated to the Communications and Information Technology Commission.
- United Arab Emirates will have the مارات (xn--mgbaam7a8h) (“Emarat”) domain delegated to the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority.
- Egypt will have the مصر (xn--wgbh1c ) (“Misr”) domain delegated to the the National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority.
During the same meeting, requests for TLD delegation for Chinese and Taiwain ccTLDs were approved to move forward in the process.
In other recent IDN news, ICANN approved the offering of 16 internationalized domains for the .tel TLD to Telnic.