ICANN this week gave preliminary approval to four countries and two
territories in five language scripts for additional internationalised
domain names (IDNs) as part of its IDN Fast Track Process.
The announcement sees Hong Kong receiving preliminary approval for 'Hong
Kong' in Chinese. Others to gain preliminary approval were the
Palestinian Territories for 'Palestine' in Arabic, Qatar for 'Qatar' in
Arabic, Sri Lanka for 'Lanka' in Sinhalese and Tamil, Thailand for
'Thai' in Thai and Tunisia for 'Tunis' in Arabic.
In January ICANN gave preliminary approval to four other IDNs. Those
successful were Egypt for 'Egypt' in Arabic, the Russian Federation for
'RF' in Cyrillic, Saudi Arabia for 'AlSaudiah' in Arabic and United Arab
Emirates for 'Emirates' in Arabic.
In addition, two proposals were sent for a further review this week.
These were to China for 'China' in simplified and traditional Chinese
and to Taiwan for 'Taiwan' in simplified and traditional Chinese.
"The delay is not over political disputes says" the AP, "but rather
because the Chinese language can be written in two ways - using
simplified and traditional scripts."
So while only preliminary approval has been given, it is to be expected
registrations for these domains will commence later in 2010. Most likely
there will be sunrise and landrush periods, although each registry will
no doubt have their own rules.
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