Soon ICANN will publish the second part of the rules for potential participants in the next phase of the new generic top-level domain program. According to Domain Incite, the changes to these rules will include one that could be considered significant. ICANN may allow the inclusion of single-character domains in the DNS root zone.
Today, domain names in Latin-script strings must be three characters and over (because two-letter strings are reserved for ccTLDs). We can say up front that this will not change. But an exception may be made for domain zones using the Han script as used in Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Han is an ideographic script, which means that a single character can have a meaning like a word or an entire phrase. For example, 水 means “water” in Chinese.
In the first stage of the new domains program, the possibility of using the Han script was not considered, and so the issue of single-character domains was not raised. Now, as internationalized domains develop, the situation is changing, and though there are no internationalized gTLDs with names consisting of less than two characters so far, ICANN is trying to prepare for this change.
