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Letter from Chuck Gomes to Kurt Pritz

From: Chuck Gomes
To: Kurt Pritz
Date: 27 Oct 2004
Subject: RRA Amendments for Transfer Policy

Kurt,

Here are the RRA amendments and two transmittal messages to registrars that we would like to send out as soon as possible this week so that registrars can execute them before November 12th when the new policy goes into effect. I want to call your attention to items 3 and 4 in the amendments. I believe that we can remove item 3 if we are able to get a written statement that ICANN will indemnify VeriSign per the terms of our registry agreements (.com - II.6 and .net - 4.6). In my opinion that would be strongly preferable as you and I discussed earlier this week. Item 4 is designed to avoid this problem in the future by giving us a clause similar to other registries (e.g., .org - 2.9).

I apologize for the short turnaround time, but it is very important to give the registrars some time to execute these and the clock is nearly out. I would sincerely appreciate your response regarding indemnification and approval of the amendments by tomorrow, October 28, if at all possible. Regardless, please call me so I know where we are at.

Thanks,

Chuck Gomes
VeriSign Naming & Directory Services

Attachment 1
Attachment 2
Attachment 3
Attachment 4

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."