البحرين.

البحرين. (albahrain) is the Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) ccTLD variant for Bahrain. Like .bh, it is administered by the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) of the Kingdom of Bahrain.

History

In September 2018, an application was made to the ICANN ccTLD IDN Fast Track Process to have the string “البحرين” recognized as representing Bahrain in Arabic script. On 6 November 2018, a review by the IDN Fast Track DNS Stability Panel found that the applied-for string “presents none of the threats to the stability or security of the DNS identified in Module 4 of the Fast Track Implementation Plan, and presents an acceptably low risk of user confusion." The request for the “البحرين” string to represent Bahrain was subsequently approved.

In June 2019, TRA initiated a request for delegation of the البحرين. top-level domain, which was conceded.

Rules and Restrictions

Most of the rules are same as the ones for .bh, which can be seen here. There is a difference for the use of characters, which must follow the regulation below:

• The Domain Name shall comply with the Unicode in accordance with the permitted characters stipulated in their regulation Appendix A. Also, Arabic is a right-to-left language. The IDN Labels that consist of letters in this table may not begin with a number (i.e. letters U+002DU+0039 and U+0660 U+0669)
• The Domain Name shall not be less than one field.
• The Domain Name shall not start with a number.
• The Domain Name shall be in Arabic only. The Arabic Labels may not contain European numbers and Arabic-Indian numbers, which means that the text may not be a mixture of both.
• The Domain Name shall not contain the sign (-) in the third and fourth positions.
• The Domain Name shall not contain any spaces.
• The diacritics are not allowed.

Also, about similarities:

• IDN similarities are only allowed for the same registrar to place the similarities that lead to confusion.
• The Bahrain registry may reject the IDN similarities to avoid confusion.

Internationalized Domain Name

Country code top-level domain