The Moscow Times reports that domain names in Russia ending in the Cyrillic IDN ccTLD, .рф may be available as soon as this week. Representatives from ICANN may officially assign .рф to Russia at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) meeting in Moscow starting this thursday.

“We’re really expecting it within days. As soon as the domain is delegated it will start working, because everything is ready on our side,” Andrei Vorobyov, a spokesman for Ru-Center, a domain registrar commented.

For the full report, refer to: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/cyrillic-domains-may-start-working-this-week/405775.html

We can finally start to register complete domain names in non-latin characters as representatives of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approves the first three internationalised domain name (IDN) country-code top level domain (ccTLD) to be placed in the DNS root zone.

The three IDN ccTLDs are:

• Egypt: مصر (Egypt)
• Saudi Arabia: السعودية (AlSaudiah)
• United Arab Emirates: امارات (Emarat)

“All three are Arabic script domains, and will enable domain names written fully right-to-left,” Kim Davies, Root Zone Services Manager of ICANN said.

“If your software does not have full IDN support, this might not work exactly as expected,” Davies continued. “You may see a mangled string of letters and numbers, and perhaps some percent signs or a couple of “xn--”s mixed into the address bar. Or it may not work at all.”

One of the first operational website as a result of the introduction of IDN ccTLD(s) is the Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology whose domain name is وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر

As of this post, ICANN has received a total of 21 requests for IDN ccTLD(s) representing 11 languages including Chinese, Russian, Tamil and Thai.

About RegistryASP

RegistryASP is an leading registry backend provider that has a proven track record of operational performance and excellent customer support. RegistryASP provides registry services for .cd, .co, .hk and .sg. In addition, RegistryASP provides customised registry components for .my and policy consultation services to .om.

For more information about RegistryASP, please visit http://www.registryasp.com

.KURD or .KUR is a decision a Kurdish company must decide on to use and represent over 35 million Kurdish people worldwide. A huge number of Kurdish people live in Iran and Iraq, while there are approximately 14 million Kurdish people in Turkey.

This initiative is being driven by Aras Noori, a German resident. Noori wrote to ICANN’s CEO and president Rod Beckstrom in April 2010. He advised of the Kurdish community’s decision to either apply for .KURD or .KUR.

In the letter, Noori said “a domain extension for the Kurdish people has been a dream of many communities like ZKURD , KurdITgroup , KOSC and others. We, with support of many Kurdish groups and communities are committed in making a domain extension available for Kurd people.”

Please visit http://dotkurd.org/en for more information on the proposal.

ICANN revealed the proposed implementation plan for synchronized IDN ccTLDs on 22 March 2010.

Synchronized IDN ccTLDs are described by situations listed in the Fast Track Process by ICANN where:

• IDN ccTLDs are requested in more than one official language or script in a country/territory,
• the requests for corresponding multiple strings are considered equivalent and delegation would solve a significant problem for Internet users, and
• users accessing domains under any of the equivalent IDN ccTLDs expect that such domains will resolve to the same address or value.

There are still several comments in the open Public Comment forum for the proposed plan. In addition, several independent observations and requests for clarification have been made by the technical community to ICANN. In order to address these questions, ICANN has published a set of Questions and Answers (Q&A) and is conducting two webinars. The webinars will include a presentation of the Proposed Implementation Plan and allow for questions by interested participants.

Please kindly visit http://icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-22mar10-en.htm for more information on the proposed plan and webinars.

What is .MLS? MLS stands for multiple listing services, and supposedly 15 of the leading MLSs have got together to form the MLS Domains Association, a non-profit association made up of real estate multiple listing services. Its sole purpose of which is to obtain, manage, and promote the use of the .MLS top-level domain on the internet. The Association has announced they will apply for the gTLD late in 2010 or whenever ICANN begins taking applications. If successful, MLSs will be able to obtain domains such as Maine.MLS, Chicago.MLS, etc in the future.

“For years, MLSs and REALTOR Associations have objected to businesses referring to themselves as ‘MLSs’ in their marketing, when in fact they are not MLSs,” said Bob Bemis, interim President of the Association and CEO of the Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service. Under United States trademark law, the term “multiple listing service” is generic; MLSs are not allowed claim exclusive use of it. “Our goal is to create a place, the .MLS top-level domain, where the web sites actually belong to MLSs, not to other types of business,” he added.

What are the perceived benefits of this extension? According to the news release, the Association’s leaders plan for .MLS is to deliver the following benefits:

• Unique location of MLS data on the Internet. Use and effective marketing of the .MLS TLD only by MLSs will make sites at the .MLS TLD definitive sources of listings.
• Key geographical second-level domains (SLDs) will be available to MLSs. MLSs can obtain common second-level domains (SLDs) on .MLS that have long since been sold on the .COM, .NET, and .ORG TLDs. Domains like Maine.com, Texas.org, Chicago.net, etc., were long ago registered by non-MLS entities. Texas.MLS, Chicago.MLS, and all other location and plain English-word domain names will be available to MLSs as SLDs under .MLS.
• Better search engine ranking for MLS public web sites. According to some search engine optimization experts, sites at .MLS domains may receive higher rankings if consumers search for “MLS” on search engines. For example, a search for “new jersey mls” on Google would likely rank a site at “newjersey.mls” high in the results. Consumers might be more prone to select search results that have .MLS TLDs because consumers may believe they will provide more reliable information.

For more information, please refer to http://mlsdomains.org