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About ccTLD Compliance

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ICANN does not have contract authority to take compliance action against ccTLD operators.

Although ICANN has signed over 50 Accountability Frameworks and Exchange of Letters and a limited number of sponsorship agreements and MoUs with ccTLDs, the scope of these arrangements is limited to documenting a small set of roles and areas of responsibilities between the ccTLD manager and ICANN.

For ccTLDs, this includes commitments to adhere to relevant technical standards. ICANN works cooperatively with ccTLD operators to resolve technical issues of the common interest to ensure the security, stability and operability of the Internet.

The ccTLD policies regarding registration, accreditation of registrars and Whois are managed according to the relevant oversight and governance mechanisms within the country, with no role for ICANN's Compliance department in these areas.

Related links

To contact a specific ccTLD operator in order to file a complaint or identify their local policies, refer to the IANA Root Zone Database which contains the authoritative record of the operators of each country-code top-level domain: Root Zone Database

Full list of ICANN agreements with ccTLD managers | Archived ccTLD compliance page

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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."