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Letter from Tina Dam to Ram Mohan

By E-mail and Postal Mail

Mr. Cederampattu (Ram) Mohan
Vice President, Business Operations

Afilias Limited
300 Welsh Road, Building 3, Suite 105
Horsham, PA-19044

Dear Mr. Mohan:

Thank you for submitting the service description for the Redemption Grace Period Service for .info, and for requesting a temporary authorization to implement the new Registry RGP Service for .info.

The new Registry Service will involve various changes to the specifications for provision of services as well as the charging of fees to registrars, and is therefore subject to approval under the .info Registry Agreement.

ICANN and Afilias have conducted discussions on the conditions under which Afilias intends to implement the RGP Service, however we have not yet agreed on the exact language on the contractual revisions and in any event it appears that the appropriate amendments will not be formally approved by the ICANN Board until its next available Board Meeting. To allow the services to be offered to registrars in the interim, it is appropriate to temporarily authorize Afilias to charge for this service, pending Board consideration.

Accordingly, Afilias is temporarily authorized to implement a Redemption Grace Period for .info on the following conditions:

  1. The .info Redemption Grace Period Service will require modifications to the specifications stated in the Appendices C (Functional Specification), O (Whois Specification), and T (Monthly Reports) to the Registry Agreement.
  2. Fees to registrars will be no greater than the maximum fee of USD40, as will be described in the Appendix G to the Registry Agreement.
  3. Afilias’s services will otherwise comply with the requirements of the ICANN-Afilias Registry Agreement, including its appendices.
    The price maximum for the RGP Service is consistent with the maximum prices already approved by ICANN Board for .com, .net, .org, and .biz.

The above temporary authorization is given to allow the scheduled deployment of the .info Redemption Grace Period on 27 September 2003. The authorization is subject to approval (and revision) by the ICANN Board upon its full consideration of this matter, which is expected to occur during the next available ICANN Board Meeting. Except as expressly stated above, this letter does not waive any of Afilias obligations under its .info Registry Agreement with ICANN.

Best regards,

Tina Dam
Chief gTLD Registry Liaison

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."