امارات.

امارات. (Emarat) is the IDN country code top-level domain for the United Arab Emirates. It is managed by .aeDA, which is part of the Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority of UAE (TDRA).

String

“امارات” is represented in ASCII-compatible encoding according to the 2003 IDNA specification as “xn--mgbaam7a8h”. The individual Unicode code points that comprise this string are U+0627 U+0645 U+0627 U+0631 U+0627 U+062A.

In Arabic language, the string has a meaning equivalent to “Emirates” in English. Its pronunciation in English is transliterated as “Emarat”. The string is expressed using the Arabic script.

History

In light of ICANN’s initiatives to allow for internationalized country code top-level domains, the UAE Telecommunications Regulatory Authority conducted a consultation process in 2009, in order to identify the appropriate string to select as an IDN ccTLD to represent the United Arab Emirates. Participants in the consultation process were the regulatory authority, the Ministry of Cabinet Affairs representing the UAE Government, Emirates Internet Group representing the local user community, and two Internet providers, Etisalat and du.

The consultation sought responses on how the domain should be run, and who the registry operator should be, considering key aspects of neutrality, technology, policy, financial sustainability, promotion of the TLD, continuous development and experience. The consensus, and conclusion of the consultation, was that the new domain should be operated in a similar fashion as the .ae domain, by the same operator.

In November 2009, an application was made to the new “IDN Fast Track” process to have the string “امارات” recognized as representing the United Arab Emirates. The request was supported by the Government of the United Arab Emirates, with additional community support from the Emirates Internet Group, Etisalat, du, the UAE University, and the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority.

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 [the United Arab Emirates] (a) present none of the threats to the stability or security of the DNS ... and (b) present an acceptably low risk of user confusion”. The request for the string to represent the United Arab Emirates was subsequently approved.

On 21 January 2010, the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority presented an application to ICANN for delegation of “امارات” as a top-level domain, which was granted.

Composition and Characters

The User Form of the Domain Name must:

• be in Unicode Normalisation Form C (NFC);
• consist only of Unicode Code Points present in the Tables ofAllowed Letters, Numbers and Special Characters defined in the Appendix A of .dotEMARAT Domain Name Policy, which can be downloaded here;
• not begin with a digit (English ASCII or Arabic digits);
• not contain both English ASCII AND Arabic digits;
• neither begin with nor end with a dash;
• not contain a dash in the third and fourth positions; and
• not include a space.

The DNS Form of the Domain Name must:

• have no more than a maximum of 63 characters in each label;
• be the ASCII Compatible Encoding equivalent of a valid User Form. This label will:

1. use the English ASCII character set and may contain letters (i.e., a-z), digits (i.e. 0-9) and dash (-) or a combination of these;
2. begin with a letter or a digit and end with a letter or a digit;
3. neither begin with, nor end with a dash;
4. not include a space (e.g. xn--mg bh0fb.xn--mgbaam7a8h); and
5. must start with xn--.

Internationalized Domain Name

Country code top-level domain

Top-Level Domain