.ps

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The Internationalized country code top-level domain for the State of Palestine is .فلسطين, which is represented as .xn--ygbi2ammx in Punycode.

History

The limits of telecommunications in Palestine

Following the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian telecommunications sector was allowed to grow but under the condition of remaining under Israeli control for anything related to access to the wider world. Palestinian companies, namely Paltel, were forced to sign agreements with Israeli companies to access global communications networks.

The power to veto the connection of Palestine to the wider communications system resulted in Israel opposing the access of Palestine to the International Telecommunication Union, on the legal pretext that Palestine was not a UN state.

It was only with the 1998 resolution 52/250 of the UNGA that the situation changed. The resolution allowed Palestine wider access to rights within the UN. On this basis, the ITU passed resolution 99, granting Palestine observer status.

Creation of the country code

Similar issues as with the wider telecommunications sector plagued the Palestinian Authority's quest for a country code for the country. The Palestinian Authority made a first attempt in 1997. ICAAN rejected the request on the basis that Palestine was not among the UN-recognized countries and territories in the ISO 3166-1 list. As an interim solution, the second-level "Palestine.int" was used.

The situation changed in 1999, when, after two years of discussions, the United Nations Statistics Division told the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency that it had included "Occupied Palestinian Territory" on the UN list of Standard Country and Area Codes for Statistical Use. The agency thus announced that from 1 October 1999 it would add "ps" to the ISO 3166-1 list to designate "Occupied Palestinian Territory". The precedent of other non-independent territories, such as Puerto Rico or the Netherlands Antilles, was used to detach the decision to grant a country code from the official recognition of Palestine as a state. This opened the way for an application in 1999, which was then granted in 2000.