As Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, spiraled into chaos last month over rising energy costs and anger at the government, the country’s leaders took a drastic step to quell protests: They blocked the internet.
This was no ordinary internet blackout. For five days, the ninth largest country in the world was a black box.
The Kazakhstan government shut off the internet nationwide on Jan. 5, 2022, in response to widespread civil unrest in the country. The unrest started on Jan. 2, after the government lifted the price cap on liquid natural gas, which Kazakhs use to fuel their cars. The Kazakhstan town of Zhanaozen, an oil and gas hub, erupted with a protest against sharply rising fuel prices.
The Estonian Internet Foundation, the .ee registry, Estonian Internet Foundation, has launched a simple three-in-one personal identification service.
The Kazakh internationalised domain name .Òаз opened to registration to all on 15 August the Kazakhstan Network Information Center announced.
KazNIC has also published Rules for registration, use the and allocation of domain space in the Kazakhstan segment of the Internet.
The priority registration period has now closed for the new .ÒÐÐ TLD, the Cyrillic internationalised domain for Kazakhstan, and open registration commences on 15 August the Kazakhstan Network Information Center has announced.
As of 15 August eligible registrants will be able to register domain names containing Kazakh alphabet characters.
The first domain name, registered for testing purposes in March 2012, was ÑеÑÑ.Òаз.
For more information, see the Order of introduction of «.ÒÐл domain name and Regulations of the priority domain name registration in .ÒÐÐ domain.
[news release] ICANN announced that domain .каз had been approved and delegated to the Kazakhstan Association of IT companies. According to ICANN, the new internationalized top-level domain name is of some interest to the global Internet community. The Kazakhstan Association of IT companies has not yet announced terms and conditions of domain names registration in the new domain.
âThe Cyrillic script is one of the most popular alphabets on the Internet and the debut of yet another domain that uses the Cyrillic script is crucial for the development of the Web as a whole, – said Andey Kolesnikov, the CCâs CEO. â Hopefully, the positive record of the registry for domain .ÑÑ will help the Kazakhstan Association of IT companies launch their Cyrillic domainâ.
Presently there are slightly less than 30 countries in the world which have been delegated internationalized top-level domains. The Arabic, Cyrillic, Chinese and Tamil scripts are the most popular script variants in the existing IDNs. It should be noted that strings by applicant nations submitted for the ICANNâs approval do not always successfully pass the test. For example, domains . ελ (Greece) and .бг (Bulgaria) were rejected because the ICANN commission considered these variants similar to already existing or reserved domain names.
This Coordination Center for TLD RU news release was sourced from:
cctld.ru/en/news/news_detail.php?ID=3456
ICANN is pleased to announce the successful completion of String Evaluation on proposed IDN ccTLD string for Kazakhstan.
Details of the successful evaluation are provided here: www.icann.org/en/topics/idn/fast-track/string-evaluation-completion-k-en.htm#kz.
The IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) ccTLD Fast Track Process was approved by the ICANN Board at its annual meeting in Seoul, South Korea on 30 October 2009. First requests were received starting 16 November 2009. The process enables countries and territories to submit requests to ICANN for IDN ccTLDs, representing their respective country or territory names in scripts other than Latin. IDN ccTLD requesters must fulfill a number of requirements:
The request and evaluation processes entail three steps:
With this announcement, a total of 28 countries/territories requests have successfully passed through the String Evaluation. Of these, 20 countries/territories (represented by 30 IDN ccTLDs) are delegated in the DNS root zone; with the remainder either readying to apply, or actively applying for, delegation of the string. Up-to-date numbers about the IDN Fast Track Program will continue to be provided on the Fast Track Process web page at www.icann.org/en/topics/idn/fast-track/ and at the ICANN Dashboard on Performance Metrics at https://charts.icann.org/public/index-idn.html.
ICANN looks forward to enabling the availability of non-Latin country-code domains for countries that meet the Fast Track Process requirements. ICANN will continue to accept new string evaluation requests in the Fast Track Process.  Staff support is available to help all countries and territories interested in participating in the Fast Track Process. Please email idncctldrequests@icann.org for any inquiries for participation.
This ICANN announcement was sourced from:
www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-08sep11-en.htm