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.bio Registry Agreement

On 6 March 2014, ICANN and STARTING DOT LIMITED entered into a Registry Agreement under which STARTING DOT LIMITED operated the .bio top-level domain. Effective 31 March 2017, the Registry Agreement was assigned by Starting Dot Limited to Afilias plc, which now operates the .bio top-level domain. The agreement may be viewed by following the links below:

Registry Agreement

2017 Global Amendment to the base Registry Agreement

The 2017 Global Amendment to the base New gTLD Registry Agreement is effective as of 31 July 2017. For additional information, please visit the Global Amendment webpage.

Assignment and Assumption Agreement

Starting Dot Limited to Afilias plc (31 March 2017)

Updates to General Notices Contact

  • PDF (15 September 2016)
  • PDF (03 June 2015)

Note: The official version is the Word version above. This HTML version is machine-generated and may not display correctly.

TLD Startup Information

Registry Agreement Archive

Authorization(s) for Release of Reserved Names

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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."