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IDN Variant TLD Implementation

Communities using certain scripts, such as Arabic and Han, have identified that Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) labels may have variant labels. However, the ICANN Board resolved on 25 September 2010 that "no variants of gTLDs will be delegated ... until appropriate variant management solutions are developed." Subsequent work by ICANN organization and the community led to the identification of two issues: (i) there is no accepted definition for variant TLDs, and (ii) there is no 'variant management' mechanism for TLDs.

The first issue is addressed by the Root Zone Label Generation Rules (RZ-LGR) Project. To address the second issue, ICANN organization is working with the community to develop mechanisms for IDN variant TLD implementation.

ICANN organization has developed a set of recommendations and supporting documentation on mechanism for implementing IDN variant TLDs. These documents were finalized after the public comment and have been approved by the board.

  1. IDN Variant TLD Implementation – Executive Summary
  2. IDN Variant TLD Implementation – Motivation, Premises and Framework
  3. IDN Variant TLD Implementation – Recommendations and Analysis
  4. IDN Variant TLD Implementation – Rationale for RZ-LGR
  5. IDN Variant TLD Implementation – Risks and their Mitigation
  6. IDN Variant TLD Implementation – Appendices (A: Definitions, B: Use of ROID, C: Limiting Allocated Variant TLDs)

Please contact IDNProgram@icann.org for any inquiries about the variant management mechanisms for IDN variant TLDs.

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."