Taiwan’s primary strings are

xn--kpry57d
台灣

xn--kprw13d
台湾

Thailand’s is

xn--o3cw4h
ไทย

and Tunisia’s is

xn--pgbs0dh
تونس

According to ICANN, these three countries are free to enter the third part of the IDN Fast Track process, which is string delegation.

Glad to see more countries coming out of the gate. Hopefully we’ll see more in the next few days since it was mentioned that there were 15 applications in the cue for evaluation.

Added.

China, Hong Kong, Palestinian Territory, Qatar and Sri Lanka added to the list of countries/territories to pass string evaluation.

The first four countries/territories to have passed the evaluation process [ awaiting delegation ] are:

Saudi Arabia with primary string:

xn--mgberp4a5d4ar

السعودية

and variant strings:

xn--mgberp4a5d4a87g
السعودیة

xn--mgbqly7c0a67fbc
السعودیۃ

xn--mgbqly7cvafr
السعوديه

Egypt with string:

xn--wgbh1c
مصر

United Arab Emirates with string:

xn--mgbaam7a8h
امارات

and Russia with string:

xn--p1ai

рф

Our congratulations first to the first four countries on the list, a big Thanks to ICANN, Tina Dam and her IDN crew, and a pat on the back to ourselves for patiently waiting for this moment in IDN History.

Time to take a moment, reflect in the events of the past few years, look forward and GET READY TO RUMBLE.

Let the Games begin.

More details on this story at the ICANN site.

Not surprisingly, all of them were from Sedo’s idn .eu domain auction in December 2009 after it managed to snag a good portion of sought-after domains when the IDN dot eu landrush started on December 10th.

Here’s what made the list on this week’s sales charts.

Südtirol.eu      €9,900 = $14,355
Möbel.eu      €9,100 = $13,195
Müller.eu      €6,600 = $9,570

jobbörse.de      $3,118
öl.eu     $3,118
homöopathie.eu      $2,465
motorräder.eu      $2,406
antiquitäten.eu      $1,391
wörterbuch.eu      $1,378
póker.eu      $1,376
universität.eu      $1,308
kindermöbel.eu      $1,305
währung.eu      $1,199
schönheitschirurgie.eu      $1,037
polstermöbel.eu      $1,030

All German except for Hungarian póker.eu

The thing which concerns me, judging from many of the comments to the various blog posts and domain forums, is that many domain investors seem to be clueless as to what is really happening, or too lazy to read the documents themselves, waiting for someone to spell it out for them.

Well, since I’m a nice guy, let me oblidge.

All your IDNs are belong to us.

Seriously though, how hard is it to comprehend?

Here it is in layman’s terms without all the technical stuff.

Starting November 16th, countries around the world will be able to apply for and receive  a cctld in their language[s].

Example for the ADD-affected. Russia will apply for .рф which is the Cyrillic acronym for Russian Federation [Российская Федерация].

This is it in a nutshell. Simple, isn’t it?

Now, in order to disspell some fears and misconceptions and answer questions

Q. Why is this happening?

A. Just because. Actually, contrary to popular belief, most people around the world don’t speak English, or are not necessarily familiar with the Latin Alphabet. They need to read and interact in a script which is familiar to them.

Q. It will fragment the internet

A. We’ll use internet defragmentation for that. Fact; IDNs -second level- have been around since the year 2000. [IDN.com Idn.net, etc] Really. Tons of IDN domains have been registered since then with thousands of sites in existence, alive and kicking. That’s 9 years ago. Has the internet fragmented in your trailer park yet? Just watch out that the sky doesn’t fall on your head.

Q. What does all this mean for me?

A. Nothing, really. Well unless you’ve invested in IDNs, in which case you stand to make a decent buck in the coming months. It does mean a lot though, to billions of people around the world whose ability to surf and conduct business on the web, has been limited up to now, because they had to do it in a language they don’t understand.

Q.  But, the domains will be in a language that I don’t know and I can’t type on my keyboard so how will I get there? This is crazy.

A.  We don’t want you to go there. We’ll gladly take the millions of Chinese/Indian/Arab/Russian users who will know how to get there. That’s the reason ICANN is making IDN cctlds available. To keep you out of the loop.

Q. Foreign governments will use this as a tool for propaganda and control.

A. You Freedom Fighter, you. They can do this already with their ASCII ccTLDs since most of them are government controlled. Why would IDN ccTLDs make it any different than it is?

Q. Foreigners will use this as a tool for phishing attacks.

A. I say you’re right about that one. And, since phising attacks have been happening since the start of the internet, lets disable all ASCII domains too. Problem solved.

Someone, turn out the lights.

General Director of Begun in Moscow, Aleksey Basov, says Cyrillic domains are attractive to people who want to penetrate potential markets.

“Cyrillic domains reflect recent trends which attempt to reach out to parts of the population that are not comfortable using the English-language international standard,” Basov said.

More of this story here

ICANN’t is about to unleash the icctlds [ idn cctlds] with .рф out of the gates first, which should enhance IDN awareness resulting in a nice ‘explosion’ in Cyrillic domain traffic to say the least. Long awaited by IDN domain investors, the creation of  .рф and other Iternational Country Code tlds should pump some juice to the otherwise flat IDN domain market.