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Continued Operations Instrument (COI)

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Overview

The purpose of the Continuing Operations Instrument (COI) is to ensure the availability of funds to provide continuity of service to registrants of new gTLDs should an issue with a registry arise. Per Specification 8 of the base Registry Agreement, registry operators shall have a Continued Operations Instrument that provides for sufficient financial resources to cover the five critical registry functions in Section 6 of Specification 10, for a determined time period as defined in Section 1 of Specification 8.

COI Amendment Service

The COI Amendment Service provides a method for registry operators to request permission from the ICANN organization to change the value of their COI funds to align with the domain registrations under management (DUMs) projections for the gTLD.

The ICANN organization will be ensuring sufficiency of COIs as set forth in the Registry Agreement. Should ICANN find a COI is insufficiently funded at any time after a gTLD has been delegated, the registry operator will be referred to the COI Amendment Service and asked to amend their COI within 60 days.

Registry operators should submit a request via a service case in the Naming Services portal. A registry must be in good standing with the ICANN organization and its registry must have been in General Availability/Registration (GA) for a minimum of six months prior to the request date in order to be eligible for a COI Amendment.

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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."