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Billing Changes and Improvements

ICANN Billing is committed to providing its contracted parties with accurate and timely invoicing and payment services.

  • ICANN Billing has established high standards of excellence for itself and is continuously working towards achieving them.
  • Ongoing improvements to invoicing and payment services
  • Prompt and centralized responses to inquiries thru ICANN's Global Support ticketing system
  • Continued team development and process improvement

Process Improvements:

This section provide visibility into the ICANN Billing process enhancements which are focused on improving the quality and timeliness of invoices it issues to contracted parties. ICANN Billing will provide regular updates on the progress of billing improvements. The updates will be the month following each calendar quarter end. The next update will be in May 2022.

  1. The ICANN org created a cross-functional billing process improvement project team that reviews the resources, systems and processes used to produce invoices, collect payments, and support requests from contracted parties (May 2017).
  2. The ICANN org implemented a robust and scalable enterprise-wide resource planning system that is able to provide automation for improved accuracy and timeliness of invoicing (Dec 2016).
  3. The size and capabilities of the finance department personnel was increased by hiring a dedicated billing manager (Dec 2017).
  4. The implementation of quality reviews for the manual processes for updating contact information and emailing invoices. (Jan 2018).
  5. The development of process documentation for training and development of personnel in areas of billing (ongoing).
  6. ICANN Billing has established a policy to ensure that contracted parties' email inquiries to accounting@icann.org are acknowledged or responded to within 3 business days.
  7. The automation for the sending of invoices by email (July 2018).
  8. Invoice delivery preferences added to NSp allowing the contracted party to select how invoices and other billing documents are delivered; email, print or both (Sept 2021).
  9. The implementation of payment notification emails that confirm ICANN has received and processed a payment (Sept 2021).
  10. Implementation of monthly account statements (Nov 2021).
  11. ICANN org continues to work on integration of customer contact information between its internal systems.

Updated as of February 18, 2022

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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."