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About Filing a UDRP

If someone has registered a domain name in a generic top-level domain (gTLD) operated under contract with ICANN that you believe may be infringing on your trademark, you may be able to file a Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) proceeding against the registrant.

The UDRP provides a mandatory, low-cost administrative procedure primarily to resolve claims of abusive, bad faith domain name registration. In other situations, disputes may need to be resolved by traditional means such as voluntary negotiation and lawsuits.

The UDRP is only available for gTLDs operated under contract with ICANN

A full list of such gTLDs is on ICANN's Registry Listing page. For a list of country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) please refer to the complete list of ccTLDs IANA's Root Zone Database.

It is recommended to seek legal advice before filing a UDRP.

Additional information is on ICANN's webpage for Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy.

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."