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Development of the Operational Design Phase Process

The Operational Design Phase (ODP) was developed over six months through an iterative drafting process that included ICANN community input and consultation throughout.

The first version of the ODP concept paper was shared with the ICANN community on 9 October 2020 and received written input from five ICANN community groups.

Date Received Organization Document
20 November 2020 i2Coalition PDF
1 December 2020 Registries Stakeholder Group PDF
4 December 2020 GNSO Council PDF
11 December 2020 ISPCP PDF
17 December 2020 IPC PDF

The second version of the ODP concept paper was published on 18 December 2020 and received written input from five ICANN community groups.

Date Received Organization Document
22 January 2021 ALAC PDF
22 January 2021 Registries Stakeholder Group PDF
22 January 2021 Jeff Neuman PDF
23 January 2021 GAC PDF
27 January 2021 Registrar Stakeholder Group PDF

ICANN org also conducted a webinar on this second version of the ODP concept paper.

Webinar:

13 January 2021
Operational Design Phase - Discussion of Updates and Next Steps
Webinar slide deck PDF
Webinar recording Zoom recording.

Taking ICANN community input into account, ICANN org then drafted the final version of the ODP process paper. On 11 March 2021, Maarten Botterman, Chairman of the ICANN Board, and Göran Marby, ICANN President and CEO, authored a blog, which announced the publication of the final version of the ODP process paper.

Announcements and Blogs:

11 March 2021 - Advancing the Operational Design Phase

The first ODP was initiated on 25 March 2021, when the ICANN Board directed ICANN CEO to conduct an ODP for the GNSO Council Approved recommendations #1-18 of the Final Report for the Expedited Policy Development Process on the Temporary Specification for gTLD Registration Data Phase 2.

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."