ICANN will most likely approve the delegation of the internationalized country code top level domain ישראל. to Israel at a board meeting next week. The dot in the name goes on the right, in accordance with Hebrew writing rules, and the name means “Israel,” Domain Incite explains in a report.
ISOC-IL, the registry that manages Israel’s .IL, first expressed interest in an internationalized ccTLD in 2012. However, it appears ICANN is not the one responsible for the drastic delay – the Israeli government was in no hurry to grant approval, which is a requirement under ICANN’s rules, and that approval was only received last year. However, some observers generally doubt the advisability of delegating such a domain. They point out that there are fewer than 10 million Hebrew speakers in the world. Moreover, most of them speak at least one language using the Latin script, which means the lack of an internationalized ccTLD is not a serious obstacle to accessing the global network.
An indirect confirmation of this assessment can be found in the statistics from gTLD קום., a transliterated Hebrew version of .com. Two years after launch, it has fewer than 1,700 domains in its zone, and it is trending downward.
