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Root Zone Maintainer Agreement (RZMA)

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Status of RZMA

20 October 2024: ICANN and Verisign amended the renewed RZMA.

28 September 2016:  ICANN and Verisign signed the RZMA.

 

Since 2016, Verisign has provided services to ICANN related to the production and distribution of the DNS root zone, known as the Root Zone Maintainer function. This arrangement arose from the IANA stewardship transition, superseding a trilateral relationship between ICANN, Verisign, and the US Department of Commerce.

The terms of service delivery are specified in the Root Zone Maintainer Agreement (RZMA), which aims to ensure the stable, secure, and reliable maintenance of the root zone. Under the RZMA, Verisign is responsible for various root zone maintenance tasks, including compiling the root zone file at the direction of IANA functions, DNSSEC signing with the zone signing key, and distributing root zone data to root server operators.

On 9 August 2016, the ICANN Board passed a resolution approving the RZMA, which was executed on 28 September 2016. The agreement has an initial term of eight years and automatically renews for successive eight year periods unless terminated earlier as specified in its terms and conditions. 

On 20 October 2024, ICANN and Verisign updated the renewed RZMA via amendment.

 

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."