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About Public Interest Commitments Dispute Resolution Procedure (PICDRP)

Through the PICDRP, ICANN allows for the submission of an initial report claiming that a Registry may not be complying with one or more of its Public Interest Commitments (PICs) per Specification 11 of its Registry Agreement with ICANN.

ICANN will conduct an initial review of the complaint to ensure that it is complete, has a claim of non‐compliance with at least one PIC, and the reporter is in good standing.

If the report passes the initial review, the complaint will be sent to the Registry Operator. If the reporter does not believe the Registry Operator has resolved the complaint within 30 days, ICANN may forward the complaint to a panel of experts to determine whether there is non-compliance.

The decision to invoke a standing panel is determined on a case-by-case basis and may vary depending on the complexity of the alleged violation(s), potential impact on community, size of the Registry Operator, which PIC(s) are allegedly violated, how the allegations relate to ICANN's mission to ensure the stable and secure operation of the Internet's unique identifier systems, and other factors that may be raised by the PIC report or Registry Operator's responses, as applicable.

The PICDRP does not apply to any ccTLD (such as .us, .de, or .uk).

To file an initial report, please submit a PICDRP Form.

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."