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How Public Comment Works

Public Comment on each substantial piece of community work before it is considered for approval is a vital element in a variety of ICANN's processes. This page contains summary data for topics that are currently OPEN (Last-in-First sequence), have RECENTLY CLOSED or that may be appearing in UPCOMING forums in the near future with links to relevant announcements, documents, comment locations, and reference sources that can provide fuller descriptions and background information where applicable.

Each public comment topic is subject to a Comment and a Reply period as follows:

  1. The official minimum Comment period is 21 days.
  2. The official minimum Reply period is 21 days.
  3. If no substantive comments are received during the Comment period, then there will be no Reply period.
  4. During the Reply period, participants should address previous comments submitted; new posts concerning the topic should not be introduced. When constructing Replies, contributors are asked to cite the original poster's name, comment date, and any particular text that is pertinent.

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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."