There seems to be lots of confusion regarding the launch of the first domain name extension in Arabic script. The Egypt government put out a press release stating that they would apply with ICANN for the TLD .مصر (.masr or .misr, which is Egypt in Arab) on 16/11/2009. This has clearly been seen by some press agencies as if from today domain name registration under this first extension in Arabic script would be possible.
What is happening today, is however only the Egypt government asking ICANN if they may launch this new domain name extension. It can be assumed that ICANN will actually agree to this since they announced on their annual meeting in Korea last month that they are wanting to open the possibility for non-Latin character domain name extensions. But that certainly doesn’t make the launch happen today.
From all the information we where able to gather, there actually hasn’t been anything else decided regarding this new extension, expect for that fact that they want to launch it at some point in the future. It has not been decided yet what the restrictions would be (registrations under .com.eg have reasonably strict rules), if there will first be a sunrise for trade mark holders, there even isn’t decided yet if the Egyptian Universities Network (now responsible for .com.eg) will also manage .مصر.
So: much ado about nothing. It will still take some time before these registrations are possible.