IDN ccTLD Request From Morocco Successfully Passes String Evaluation
ICANN has announced the successful completion of String Evaluation on proposed a IDN ccTLD string for Morocco on November 15, 2010.
As IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) ccTLD Fast Track Process was approved by the ICANN Board at its annual meeting in the end of October 2009, countries and territories using scripts other than Latin were enabled to submit their requests for the respective IDN ccTLDs in national languages. The requesters, however, have to fulfill certain requirements in order to pass the evaluation: firstly, the script used to represent the IDN ccTLDs must be non-Latin. In addition, the language used for new domain zone should be official in the corresponding country or territory; lastly, the proposed ccTLD must meet a specific set of technical requirements.
After all these steps are passed successfully for proposed Moroccan IDN ccTLD, the latter will soon be delegated and become available in the DNS root zone. At the moment ICANN has received a total of 33 similar requests, representing 22 languages. Only 5 countries have their own national domain zones so far, including China, Egypt, Emirates, Russia and Saudi Arabia.
Sex Sells: Sex.com Sold For $13 Mln.
Sedo have confirmed sex.com has officially been sold. Selling to a Caribbean offshore company for $13 million, the domain sale is considered to be highest value in history, being also the largest one this year and beating the previous record of slots.com selling for $5.5 mln.
Clover Holdings acquired the domain in an auction run by one of Sedo's brokers in accordance with an order issued by the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California. Escom, the previous sex.com owner, held the domain since 2006 when it sold for $12 mln., but was unable to comply with the market, finally going bankrupt. As Kieren McCarthy, the domain industry expert, notes in his blog, "possibly the most interesting thing, apart from the peculiar behaviour of all parties yet again, is that the domain has gone up in price by only $1m in nearly five years." McCarthy is sure that this price points out to certain factors, including dot-com market stability. The analyst is pretty sure that the buyers kept the price low intentionally, knowing that Escom had no real choice.
German Domain Acquires The Entire Alphabet Finally
Umlauts have been allowed to be used in .de domains already since 2004. Only one letter of the German alphabet was still missing – the Latin small letter sharp s, also known as “eszett”. At the moment, German users can finally get hold of the domains containing the “eszett”. In the three-week sunrise period preceding the official launch, only holders of domains with names containing the letter combination “ss” were entitled to register the corresponding ß-domains. With the end of privilege period on November 16, 2010, denic.de, the central German domain registry, has reported more than 187,000 submitted requests for domains containing ß in the first hours of open registration period.
