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.koeln Registry Agreement

On 9 January 2014, ICANN and NetCologne Gesellschaft für Telekommunikation mbH entered into a Registry Agreement under which NetCologne Gesellschaft für Telekommunikation mbH operated the .koeln top-level domain. Effective 30 January 2018, the Registry Agreement was assigned by NetCologne Gesellschaft für Telekommunikation mbH to punkt.wien GmbH, which now operates the .koeln top-level domain. Effective 31 March 2018, the Registry Agreement was assigned by punkt.wien GmbH to dotKoeln GmbH, which now operates the .koeln top-level domain. The agreement and its supplement 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 of Registry Agreement(s)

punkt.wien GmbH to dotKoeln GmbH (31 March 2018)

NetCologne Gesellschaft für Telekommunikation mbH to punkt.wien GmbH (30 January 2018)

Updates to General Notices Contact

  • PDF (30 March 2018)
  • PDF (04 November 2016)

Amendments

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

Supplement to Registry Agreement

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

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."