Blacknight Announce the Arrival of The First New Top-Level Domains

Expansion of domain names underway with launch of first four new domains

Blacknight, Ireland’s leading domain registrar and hosting company are happy to announce the addition of the first of many New Top-Level domains.

It has been a long process, but ICANN has finally given the green light to four new domain extensions. These are the first of several hundred new domain extensions that will be available for registration by the general public. As ICANN decided to give IDN (non-ASCII script) TLDs priority, the first four new domain extensions to be “delegated” are IDNs:

游戏(xn--unup4y) – Chinese for “game(s)”

сайт (xn--80aswg) – Cyrillic for “site”

онлайн (xn--80asehdb) – Cyrillic for “online”

شبكة (xn--ngbc5azd) – Arabic for “web/network”

The new extensions are not yet available for registration, but they’ll be coming online in the next few weeks (and months) as the new registry operators finalise their launch plans, contract with registrars (such as Blacknight) and go through a full launch process.

Blacknight created the site http://www.dotwhat.co/ devoted to new TLDs that hosts a breakdown of TLDs, applicants, countries and all of the information curious customers need to get ready for the massive change coming to the Internet. “This is a tremendously exciting day for those of us who have been involved with New TLDs for the last several years,” explains Blacknight CEO Michele Neylon. “The Internet community has been working tirelessly in anticipation of this day and we are proud to announce the integration of the first four IDN domains.”

Neylon continues: “While IDNs (internationalised domain names i.e. full UTF-8 domain extensions that support scripts other than Latin) might not be that important to Blacknight’s primary client base, they’re important to a lot of the non-English speaking world.”

In a press release issued by ICANN, Akram Atallah, president of ICANN's Generic Domains Division states: "In the weeks and months ahead, we will see new domain names coming online from all corners of the world, bringing people, communities and businesses together in ways we never imagined. It's this type of innovation that will continue to drive our global society."

At the moment there are only one or two domain names in the new extensions that resolve. For example, .游戏 have registered nic.游戏 and it can be reached already in your browser (just click on the link).

For more information on New gTLDs, please visit http://www.icann.org

For more information on domains offered by Blacknight please visit http://www.blacknight.com