Proposed Measures for Letter/Letter Two-Character ASCII Labels to Avoid Confusion with Corresponding Country Codes

• Top-Level Domains
• Second-Level Domains
• Contracted Party Agreements
• Security/Stability

As per Section 2 of Specification 5 of the New gTLD Registry Agreement, "All two-character ASCII labels shall be withheld from registration or allocated to Registry Operator at the second level within the TLD. Such labels may not be activated in the DNS, and may not be released for registration to any person or entity other than Registry Operator, provided that such two-character label strings may be released to the extent that Registry Operator reaches agreement with the related government and country-code manager of the string as specified in the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 standard. The Registry Operator may also propose the release of these reservations based on its implementation of measures to avoid confusion with the corresponding country codes, subject to approval by ICANN."

This public comment is to gather community feedback in order to establish the list of measures a registry must implement in order to release from reservation at the second-level of the domain name system letter/letter two-character ASCII labels not otherwise reserved pursuant to Specification 5 Section 6 of the Registry Agreement. If adopted, all currently reserved two-letter second-level domains would be released for all gTLD registries who implement the measures.