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Privacy and Proxy Services Accreditation

Implementation Project Status

Updated 6 March 2020

Implementation Project Status
  • Implementation of the Privacy and Proxy Service Provider Accreditation Program is currently on hold, pending related work in Phase 2 of the Expedited Policy Development Process on the Temporary Specification for gTLD Registration Data.
  • Upon resumption of the implementation, the following draft materials are expected to be published for public comment, along with questions for community feedback:
    • Privacy and Proxy Service Provider Accreditation Policy
    • Privacy and Proxy Service Provider Accreditation Agreement
    • Privacy and Proxy Service Provider Accreditation Program Applicant Guide
    • Privacy and Proxy Service Provider Suspension, De-Accreditation and Transition Procedure

Timeframe

  • Board Approval: 9 August 2016
  • Draft implementation plan/framework distributed to IRT: 14 October 2016 (available on the community wiki, login required for access)
  • IRT kickoff meeting: 18 October 2016
  • Public comment period on proposed implementation of Privacy and Proxy Service Provider Accreditation Program: TBD

Summary

The 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) includes a Specification on Privacy and Proxy Registrations that contains requirements for privacy and proxy service registrations offered through affiliates and resellers of registrars accredited under the 2013 RAA.

These requirements will be replaced by the Privacy and Proxy Accreditation Program. ICANN is implementing this program based on Final Recommendations [PDF, 1.24 MB] that were developed by the GNSO Privacy & Proxy Services Accreditation Issues PDP Working Group, adopted by the GNSO Council and approved by the ICANN Board.

New accreditation program requirements will include:

  • Detailed frameworks for provider responses to requests from law enforcement authorities and intellectual property holders
  • Standardized requirements for providers' relay of communications from third parties to privacy and proxy service customers
  • Provider data escrow and data retention requirements
  • A new Registration Data Directory Service label to identify registrations involving a privacy and or proxy service
  • Required provider notices to privacy and proxy service customers and third-party requesters
  • A mandatory provider educational program

Resources

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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."