ICANN Blogs

Read ICANN Blogs to stay informed of the latest policymaking activities, regional events, and more.

Making Chinese Internet History

28 June 2010
By Tina Dam

This past week was quite the historical change for the Internet with several additional languages moving forward in the IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process.

Chinese:
With one billion people around the world using Chinese as their primary language, it means that one out of every five people on the planet can have benefit from the introduction of the newly approved Chinese extensions:

• .中国 and .中國 – CNNIC – the China Internet Network Information Center http://www.cnnic.cn

• .香港 – HKIRC – Hong Kong Internet Registration Corporation Limited http://www.hkirc.hk

• .台灣 and .台湾- TWNIC – Taiwan Network Information Center http://www.twnic.tw

This is also the first time that variants are allowed at top-level domains or extensions for the Internet. For CNNIC and TWNIC they each have two variants approved for delegation. Both organizations have over a decade in variant operational experience, and have published implementation plans that describe how the variants are to be managed. We hope to get some good experience in these launches that can be used generally for TLD variant management and help us make this available for others as well.

At lot of people are of course asking the obvious question: when will we be able to make registrations and what are the registration rules? They should be available shortly, but please go to the respective organization for the IDN ccTLD management for more details about registration rules, launches and timelines.

At the ICANN meeting in Brussels, where the ICANN Board approval took place on 25 June 2010, it was followed by a CDNC event. Everybody celebrated the newly approved Chinese IDN ccTLDs, with music and food – pictures to come.

Singapore and Syria:
This month’s IDN ccTLD string evaluation completions included Singapore and Syria, with:

Syrian Arab Republic: سورية (Arabic)
Singapore: 新加坡 and சிங்கப்பூர் (Chinese and Tamil)

This means that the two organizations now can submit their requests to have these strings delegated as new top-level domains for use in the Internet.

IDN ccTLD Fast Track Status:
All in all we have now received 31 requests for IDN ccTLDs from countries and territories. Together they represent 19 languages. Details can be found at: http://icann.org/en/topics/idn/fast-track/string-evaluation-completion-en.htm

Authors

Tina Dam