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Message from Elana Broitman to Paul Twomey

From: Elana Broitman
Sent: 01 October, 2003 12:07
To: Paul Twomey
Cc: Dan Halloran
Subject: Registrars Ballot "TLD Wildcards"

Dear Paul - On October 24th, the Registrar Constituency had passed a ballot with regard to the VeriSign Site Finder (or Wild Card) service. I am sending you the text of the ballot, which was passed unanimously by 73% of the eligible votes, with a single abstention. The Constituency recommends that the text of the ballot be added as its formal position to the link under ICANN's site regarding this issue.

Regards,

Elana Broitman
Chair, Registrar Constituency

The text of this closed ballot is as follows:

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"TLD Wildcards"

Whereas, VeriSign has created a condition that presently risks the stability and security of the domain name system;

Whereas, this condition undermines competition in the registrar and registry sectors;

Whereas, this initiative was undertaken without prior notice to registrars, network operators, internet service providers, the general internet community and ICANN and its constituencies;

Therefore be it resolved that the GNSO Registrar Constituency strongly recommends that ICANN immediately require that VeriSign suspends this condition and returns a "NXDOMAIN" response for zone file entries that do not exist and ceases serving requests for wild-card entries in response to DNS queries to the relevant gTLD zones until such time as ICANN and its Supporting Organizations provide input on the relevant security, stability and competition issues; and

Resolved that the GNSO Registrar Constituency strongly urge that ICANN conduct an analysis to ensure that any such service be in compliance with the Verisign .com and .net Registry Agreements, any other applicable agreements and the principles of maintaining and coordination the security and stability of the DNS in a competitive environment prior to the reinitiation of the aforementioned condition; and

Resolved that the GNSO Registrar Constituency highly recommends that any gTLD registry be required to follow a predetermined process designed to ensure similar consultation, analysis and provide due and proper notice prior to creating similar conditions or new service.

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Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."