Hong Kong to register International Domain Names (IDNs)

From January 18, 2011, names with characters from the national alphabet will no longer be registered in the Hong Kong national domain zone .HK, since ICANN confirmed the creation of a Hong Kong top-level IDN written in hieroglyphs back in the summer of 2010.

The new domain will be delegated in February-March of this year. Meanwhile, registering a multilingual domain in .HK will be impossible. Those who have already registered Chinese domains in .HK will receive equivalent names for free when registering in the new Hong Kong domain. HK is an open domain, and both residents and non-residents can register. Second-level subdomains of IDV.HK are exclusively available to Hong Kong citizens.

Registration of multilingual .HK domain names began in January 2007. Within two years, their number had reached 3,500, while the total number of names registered in the Hong Kong domain was approximately 200,000.