During an in camera meeting, ICANN’s board of directors approved two new country-code domains, Domain Incite reports. The first is Mauritania’s موريتانيا (.xn--mgbah1a3hjkrd) domain, which is the Arabic-script version of the country’s name. The second is the .SS domain, which now belongs to the young African country of South Sudan.
As reported earlier, many political and public figures were concerned with the .SS name, noting that many countries associate this abbreviation primarily with the Nazi Schutzstaffel unit. They also shared their concern that the domain might become popular among neo-Nazi movement representatives and organizations. However, ICANN remains powerless in that regard. On the one hand, the two-letter code SS was given to South Sudan by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which means that the country has every right to choose this exact domain name. On the other hand, ICANN does not have the right to restrict any content in the delegated domain zones. The موريتانيا domain has already been added to the DNS root, while .SS has not.
