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Registry Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Please note that the English language version of all translated content and documents are the official versions and that translations in other languages are for informational purposes only.

2017 Global Amendment to the Base New gTLD Registry Agreement
The Registry Stakeholder Group (RySG) notified the ICANN organization on 16 July 2014 that it wished to negotiate proposed changes to the Registry Agreement ("RA") pursuant to Section 7.7 of the RA. Following negotiations between the ICANN organization and the RySG Working Group ("WG"), a 50-day public comment period, and analysis of the public comments by the ICANN organization and the WG, the ICANN organization submitted the proposed changes in the form of a Global Amendment for a vote by applicable registry operators according to the terms of the RA. After reaching approval by applicable registry operators on 10 April 2017, the ICANN Board approved the Global Amendment on 18 May 2017. The ICANN organization issued a 60-day notice to applicable registry operators and the 2017 Global Amendment became effective 31 July 2017.

Submission of Annual Certifications and Internal Reviews FAQ
This Annual Certification FAQ provides answers to commonly asked questions regarding various annual certifications and internal reviews required that are required under provisions of the Registry Agreement.

Registry Operator Billing FAQ [PDF, 864 KB]
The Billing FAQ provides answers to commonly asked questions regarding the billing and invoicing processes for Registry Operators.

Registry Monthly Reporting FAQs
The Registry Monthly Reporting Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) provides answers to commonly asked questions regarding the Registry Monthly Reporting processes for all registry operators. The document is useful for both technical and non-technical audiences.

Continued Operations Instrument (COI) Amendment and Obligation Release Services FAQ (Updated 13 June 2019)
The COI Amendment Service FAQ provides answers to commonly asked questions related to the COI Amendment and COI Obligation Release Services. 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 COI Obligation Release Service provides a mechanism for ICANN to release COI(s) that are no longer required per Specification 8 of the Registry Agreement.

Portal Data Exposure Issue FAQ [PDF, 147 KB] (Published 20 August 2015)
This FAQ provides answers to questions about the data exposure issue that occurred in the New gTLD Applicant and GDD Portals, which the Registry Stakeholder Group posed to the ICANN organization on the 10 June 2015 at 20:00 UTC Registry Stakeholder Call. It also contains the first set of Questions & Answers about the issue that the ICANN organization published on 2 March 2015, four days after we were made aware of it.

Name Reservation, Allocation, and Registration FAQ [PDF, 513 KB] (Published 08 August 2014)
Per Specification 5 of the Registry Agreement, registry operators are required to exclude certain domain names from registration. This FAQ answers questions to commonly asked questions pertaining to name reservation, allocation and registration.

Emergency Back-end Registry Operator (EBERO) FAQ (Published 02 April 2013)
Emergency back-end registry operators are organizations that have demonstrated years of experience in operating domain name services, registration data directory services and extensible provisioning protocol services. They have entered into three to five year contracts with the ICANN organization to provide five critical registry functions in the event of a TLD registry operator failure. The EBERO FAQ provides additional information on EBERO including why it is important, how they are chosen and when they will be activated.

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."