Several days ago, India’s The Economic Times published an interview with Devesh Tyagi, CEO of NIXI, the registry operating the Indian national ccTLD .IN. He said among other things that NIXI intends to apply for the Next Round of ICANN’s new gTLD program with strings .INDIA and .BHARAT (the latter represents the Romanized version of the name ‘India’ in Hindi).
According to the New gTLD Applicant Guidebook (AGB), applications for domains representing country names or territories cannot be approved. This ban extends to country names listed in the ISO 3166-1 standard or their translations into any language. India’s code .IN is included in ISO 3166-1 while .BHARAT is the translation of the name into Hindi.
There are no exceptions for national registries. The prohibition is based on advice from the ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee and is included in the final draft of the AGB.
Domain Incite reports that, should NIXI still decide to apply for registering .INDIA and .BHARAT as gTLDs, the registry may expect a partial refund of the application fees upon rejection. The entire fee (currently $227,000), however, will not be refunded.
