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Letter from Tina Dam to Marie Zitkova

Marie Zitkova
SITA Societe Cooperative
14, avenue Henri-Matisse
Evere
1140 Brussels
BELGIUM

Re: Conditional extension of .int relinquishment deadline

Dear Ms. Zitkova,

This letter shall confirm ICANN's conditional authorization of the extended time period for the anticipated deletion of <sita.int> as described in Attachment 23, Section 5 of the TLD sponsorship agreement between SITA and ICANN. The agreement provides as follows:

Sponsor currently has a registration of the name sita.int. Sponsor is not an international organization established by a treaty between or among national governments, and therefore does not meet the current qualifications for new registrations within .int. Sponsor shall promptly submit a plan for migration of all its use of sita.int to sita.aero (and possibly other domains) so that, no later than 24 months after the Effective Date of the Agreement, the sita.int registration may be deleted.

Under these terms, the migration must be completed no later than 17 December 2003. Following our discussions with regard to SITA's concerns that its customers may not be adequately prepared for the deletion of within the original time frame, ICANN agrees to extend this date by six months, with the result that the deletion of will take place no later than 17 June 2004, provided that SITA agrees to (i) present a revised plan to ICANN by no later than 31 December 2003 outlining the planned communications with customers SITA will undertake in this time period to effect the migration in an orderly manner and dates for such communications, and (ii) keep ICANN informed of any material deviations from such plan.

In the absence of any problems materially affecting the business of SITA's customers during the conditional extension period as a result of the migration plan, there will be no further extensions. Should any problems impacting SITA's customers to a material level arise during this time period, ICANN and SITA will undertake a further review of such problems and discuss the steps necessary to proceed with the transition. We expect that SITA will stay in close contact with ICANN staff during this period to flag problems immediately, and will notify ICANN of any significant issues encountered that may affect the scheduled migration plan.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

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."