Syria launches Arabic ccTLD
The radical change in the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' (ICANN) policy regarding new top-level domains for countries whose languages use non-Latin scripts has been welcomed by many countries. Some have already launched and are successfully operating their own IDN ccTLDs.
Russia, of course, is the leader here, where the launch of the national top-level domain .РФ has caused quite a stir, not only among cybersquatters and domainers (though of course, of course), but also among serious businesses and government agencies of the Russian Federation.
Despite the string of scandals surrounding the launch of .РФ, the domain extension's launch can generally be considered a success. Among Cyrillic-speaking countries, Bulgaria is preparing a repeat application for .БГ for the March ICANN meeting in San Francisco. Serbia's delegation of .СРБ is also expected to be approved there. Ukraine has taken a time-out in this regard.
Arab countries, in particular the Syrian Arab Republic, are actively introducing IDN ccTLDs. On June 21, 2010, the local National Agency for Network Services (NANS) received approval from ICANN to launch an Arabic top-level domain for the country. And just recently, the launch of the new domain .سورية was announced. We haven't yet been able to get a ping response from the zone, but in the TLD DNS record, the zone appears as xn--ogbpf8fl with a registration date of February 5, 2011, and an activation date from IANA of February 7. According to WHOIS, the zone has three NS servers: NS1.TLD.SY, NS2.TLD.SY, and NS-SY.RIPE.NET. The official address of the registry is declared to be REG.TLD.SY. As a reminder, the primary national domain for Syria is .SY, delegated to the country in 1996. To date, ICANN has delegated nine Arabic-language ccTLDs and is preparing to approve four more.
