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Background on Expired Domain Name Recovery

During the ICANN meeting in Cairo, the ALAC voted to request an Issues Report on the subject of registrants being able to recover domain names after their formal expiration date. The ALAC request was submitted to the GNSO Council on 20 November 2008. ICANN Staff prepared the Issues Report on post-expiration domain name recovery and submitted it to the GNSO Council on 5 December 2008. In the Issues Report, ICANN staff recommended the GNSO Council to initiate a PDP to review and consider changes to the Expired Domain Deletion Policy or develop a new consensus policy addressing:

  • Whether adequate opportunity exists for registrants to redeem their expired domain names
  • Whether expiration-related provisions in typical registration agreements are clear and conspicuous enough
  • Whether adequate notice exists to alert registrants of upcoming expirations
  • Whether additional measures need to be implemented to indicate that once a domain name enters the Auto-Renew Grace Period, it has expired (e.g. hold status, a notice on the site with a link to information on how to renew, or other options to be determined)
  • Whether, and if so, how best to enable the transfer of a domain name in RGP.

ICANN Staff provided the GNSO Council with clarifications on a number of questions raised in relation to the Issues Report. The GNSO Council reviewed these clarifications during its meeting on 29 January and agreed to create a Post-Expiration Domain Name Recovery drafting team to eventually propose recommendations for the initiation of a policy development process and create a charter for the working group.

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."