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.softbank Registry Agreement

On 02 July 2015, ICANN and SoftBank Corp., entered into a Registry Agreement under which SoftBank Corp., operates the .softbank top-level domain. Effective 21 September 2018, SoftBank Corp. commenced operations under its new name, SoftBank Group Corp. 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.

Notice of Exemption (02 July 2015)

Specification 9 - Registry Operator Code of Conduct

  • Exemption granted by way of Specification 13

Specification 13 (02 July 2015)1

.BRAND TLD Provisions

1 As modified by Base Specification 13 – Updated 31 July 2017 published on the Registry Agreements webpage.

Updates to General Notices Contact (19 February 2016)

Amendments

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

TLD Startup Information

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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."