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Letter from Louis Touton to Edward G. Viltz

By E-mail and Postal Mail

Mr. Edward G. Viltz
President and CEO
Public Interest Registry
1175 Wiehle Ave., Suite 102A
Reston, VA 20190

Dear Mr. Viltz:

Thank you for your letter dated 3 June, 2003 requesting a temporary authorization to implement the new Registry Redemption Grace Period Service for .org.

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 are therefore subject to approval under the .org Registry Agreement.

Although ICANN and PIR have reached staff-level agreement on the conditions under which this Registry Service will be offered, 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 25 June 2003 meeting in Montreal. To allow the services to be offered to registrars in the interim, it is appropriate to temporarily authorize PIR to charge for this service, pending Board consideration.

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

1. The .org Redemption Grace Period Service will conform to the specifications stated in the attached Appendix C, Part C11 [sic, C13] (as redlined).

2. The .org Grace and Pending Period Policy will conform to the attached revision to Appendix C, Part C11 (as redlined).

3. Fees to registrars will be no greater than the maximum fees described in the attached revision to Appendix G (as redlined).

4. The .org Public Whois Service will conform to the attached revision to Appendix O (as redlined).

5. PIR's monthly reports will conform to the attached revision to Appendix T (as redlined).

6. PIR's services will otherwise comply with the requirements of the ICANN-PIR Registry Agreement, including its appendices.

The price maximum in Appendix G is consistent with the maximum prices already approved by ICANN Board for .com, .net and .biz.

The above temporary authorization is given to allow the scheduled deployment in of .org Redemption Grace Period on 7 June 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 ICANN's Board Meeting, 25 June 2003. In the absence of earlier Board action, this authorization will continue until 31 July 2003. Except as expressly stated above, this letter does not waive any of PIR's obligations under its .org Registry Agreement with ICANN.

Best regards,

Louis Touton
Vice President and General Counsel

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."