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Letter from EnCirca to ICANN

October 13, 2003

Mr. Paul Twomey
President and CEO
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 330
Marina del Rey, CA 90292

Re: A Moratorium on All Registry Services

Dear Mr. Twomey:

EnCirca urges ICANN to announce a moratorium on the introduction of all registry services until the GNSO has had an opportunity to develop a consensus-based policy for the introduction of registry services.

EnCirca applauds ICANN's decision to facilitate a proposal for a timely, transparent and predictable procedure for the introduction of registry services. The entire DNS industry should ensure that the public has the highest confidence that changes are being introduced to the DNS according to a well-defined process based on consensus and not back-room agreements.

The Internet Community, as well as the various ICANN constituencies deserves clarity in the process ICANN uses to reach consensus on new registry services. Once this is clearly understood, both registries and registrars should be free to innovate for the benefit of the Internet community.

Although there may be many new services proposed by the various ICANN-sponsored registries, both SiteFinder and Wait Listing Service should be fast-tracked in the initial group of proposed services to undergo this newly developed policy process.

However, ICANN's primary mission of ensuring that a sustainable competitive marketplace exists at both the registry and registrar segments of the DNS industry is far from over. This objective should remain paramount in deciding the nature of future DNS registry services.

For these reasons, a moratorium on all pending Registry Services is appropriate until the policy development process has been adopted and can be implemented.

Respectfully Yours,

Thomas Barrett
CEO
EnCirca, Inc.
ICANN Registrar

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."