bit.ليبيا? Libya to get its Arabic ccTLD
Libyan ccTLD .ly is to get an Arabic version, ICANN has said.
The TLD is ليبيا. (Arabic reads left to right, so the dot goes at the end), means “Libya”, and the ASCII Punycode that will actually show up in the DNS is .xn--mgbb7fyab.
ICANN said that the string has passed the String Evaluation phase of the IDN ccTLD Fast Track process and is now eligible for delegation.
It’s not entirely clear how long Libya was in the “Fast Track” process, but Wikipedia has records of requests for ليبيا. going back over a decade. That’s not unusual.
But ليبيا. is an unusual, though not unprecedented, case of an IDN ccTLD set to be delegated to a different manager than the existing Latin-script ccTLD’s registry.
The Arabic version is set to go to the General Authority of Communications and Informatics, Regulatory Affairs Directorate, while .ly is delegated to the General Post and Telecommunication Company.
.ly is of course well known on the Anglophone internet as a domain hack, with the best-known registrant probably URL shortening service bit.ly.
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