السعودية.

السعودية. is the IDN ccTLD for Saudi Arabia. It is managed by the Communications, Space and Technology Commission (CITC).

The domain “السعودية” is represented in ASCII-compatible encoding according to the 2003 IDNA specification as “xn--mgberp4a5d4ar”. The individual Unicode code points that comprise this string are U+0627 U+0644 U+0633 U+0639 U+0648 U+062F U+064A U+0629.

In Arabic language, the string has a meaning equivalent to “Saudi Arabia” in English. Its pronunciation in English is transliterated as “al-Saudiah”. The string is expressed using the Arabic script.

Delegation History

In November 2009, an application was made to the new “IDN Fast Track” process to have the string “السعودية” recognised as representing Saudi Arabia. On 6 January 2010, review by the IDN Fast Track DNS Stability Panel found that “the applied-for string and declared variants associated with the application from [Saudi Arabia] (a) present none of the threats to the stability or security of the DNS ... and (b) present an acceptably low risk of user confusion; and confirm that the declared variants are legitimate variants of the applied-for (primary) string”. The request for the string to represent the country of Saudi Arabia was subsequently approved.

On 22 January 2010, CITC presented an application to ICANN for delegation of the primary string “السعودية” as a top-level domain, which was granted.

Rules and Restrictions

For the general rules and restrictions, refer to the page for Saudi Arabia's ASCII ccTLD, .sa.

Registrations are allowed only directly under السعودية.

Characters

The following conditions must be fulfilled for registering an Arabic domain name:

• the Arabic Label should be at least 2 symbols;
• the Arabic Label should have a valid Corresponding ASCII Label;
• the Arabic label should not start or end with a hyphen (-) and should not have two consecutive dashes;
• only Arabic characters are allowed;
• the symbols representing the Arabic Label should comply with terms and conditions specified by SaudiNIC which include permitted characters and symbols to be used in registering Arabic domain names. The guidelines and permitted characters and symbols table can be seen here.

Internationalized Domain Name

Country code top-level domain