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Did Kazakhstan just screw up somebody’s new gTLD plans?

Kevin Murphy, February 10, 2012, 11:30:50 (UTC), Domain Registries

ICANN has approved a new country-code top-level domain for the nation of Kazakhstan.
The new .қаз, which is “kaz” is Cyrillic, will be delegated to the “Association of IT companies of Kazakhstan”, according to a resolution passed by ICANN’s board of directors this week.
But did this move just cause problems for a new gTLD applicant?
One cultural/geographic gTLD that was proposed back in 2009 is .kab, for the Kabylia region of Algeria and the Kabyle language and people.
It’s easy to see how kab/KAB and .қаз could be considered confusing during a string similarity review, though ICANN’s laughable Sword tool only gives them a visual similarity score of 49%.
The .kab application currently has a dead web site, so it’s quite possibly one of the many new gTLD projects that fizzled out during ICANN’s repeated delays launching the program.

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Comments (3)

  1. Joe says:

    Shouldn’t all ccTLDs, even IDN ones, be 2-character?

    • Kevin Murphy says:

      I think the majority of IDN ccTLDs are more than two characters. Often they’re just the name of the country in the local script.

  2. joe2 says:

    Does it really matter?
    Seems obvious at this point …for reasons as presented herethat the gtld boat is gonna sink gaster than did the SST Titanic.
    I’d like to sign up for .fail!

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