Skip to main content
Resources

.doha Registry Agreement

On 18 Sep 2014, ICANN and Communications Regulatory Authority (CRA) entered into a Registry Agreement under which Communications Regulatory Authority (CRA) operates the .doha top-level domain. The agreement may be viewed by following the links below:

On 06 May 2019, ICANN provided Communications Regulatory Authority (CRA) with a Notice of Registry Agreement Termination. Please refer to the gTLD Registry Agreement Termination Page for more information about this termination.

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.

Updates to General Notices Contact

  • PDF (19 June 2017)

Note: If multiple versions are provided above, the official document is the Word version. The HTML version is machine-generated and may not display correctly.

Name Collision Occurrence Management Documents

A note about our terms of service:

We have updated our electronic terms of service to provide greater transparency and align with laws applicable to us. Learn more.

This site uses cookies to deliver an efficient user experience and to help us see how the site is used. Learn more.OK

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."