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About Uniform Rapid Suspension System (URS)

Through the URS ICANN offers a lower-cost, faster path to relief for rights holders experiencing clear-cut cases of infringement caused by domain name registrations.

A URS complaint must first be submitted directly to an Approved URS Provider.

URS proceedings are conducted pursuant to the approved URS and its Rules. If the URS complaint passes the URS Provider's administrative review, the Registry Operator must lock the domain name(s) in dispute within 24 hours of notification by the URS Provider. If a URS proceeding results in a Determination that one or more domain names must be suspended, the Registry Operator must implement the suspension, and take any other actions described in the URS, URS Rules and URS Technical Requirements.

ICANN's role is to ensure that the Registry Operator timely locks, and if applicable suspends, the relevant domain name(s) in accordance with the Determination, and takes any other action(s) required by the URS, URS Rules and Technical Requirements. If the Registry Operator does not lock the domain name, the URS Service Provider may submit a domain lock report via the URS Form.

If a party in the URS proceeding believes that the Registry Operator is not properly suspending a domain name or not performing any other actions required in the URS, URS Rules or Technical Requirements, they may submit a URS enforcement complaint form to ICANN via the URS Form.

Registrars serve a limited role during proceedings in compliance with obligations primarily described in the URS Technical Requirements. If a party believes that the Registrar is not complying with its obligations, it may submit a complaint to ICANN via the Generic Registrar Form.

The processes described above do not apply to any ccTLD (such as .us, .de, .uk, etc.).

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."