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Summary Report Inquiry

The summary report inquiry protocol permits an individual or organization to register a formal request (via email to public-comment@icann.org) for a staff review of a particular public comment summary report and make specific amendments or other notations based upon the rationale and support provided. Procedural rules associated with this process include:

  • Inquiries must be submitted within 30 days of the publication of the summary report
  • Please add "Summary Report Inquiry: [Public Comment Title]" to the subject line, which will flag the email as referencing this protocol
  • All inquiries received will be published on the Public Comment page
  • Staff is obliged to reply within 30 days from receipt of the inquiry including a decision and supporting rationale
  • Staff replies will be published on the Public Comment page
  • There is no formal appeal process; however, the ICANN Ombudsman may be utilized if the requesting party is dissatisfied with the outcome.
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."