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2010 Annual Whois Data Reminder Policy Audit

The Whois Data Reminder Policy (WDRP) requires that all ICANN-accredited registrars actively selling domain names remind registrants of their Whois data once a year. The reminder notice must include a provision alerting registrants that false data can result in a registration being cancelled. Registrants are requested to review the Whois data and make any necessary corrections.

Registrars operating under the 2009 Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) are required to respond to this audit request pursuant to Section 3.14 of the RAA. Registrars operating under the 2001 RAA were strongly encouraged to respond to this audit request to avoid comprehensive compliance reviews pursuant to Section 3.4 of the RAA.

To avoid escalated compliance action, such as receipt of a breach notice, registrars are strongly encouraged to respond to the audit no later than 4 March 2011. ICANN would like to thank the 758 registrars that responded before the initial deadline, 22 February 2011. A report regarding the findings from this audit will be published and available for community comment.

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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."