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Competition, Consumer Trust and Consumer Choice (CCT) Metrics Reporting

ICANN's Affirmation of Commitments mandates that it review the New gTLD Program in terms of competition, consumer trust, and consumer choice (CCT). The ICANN community recommended a list of metrics and definitions that would inform this review and the ICANN board approved these metrics. ICANN staff is responsible for collecting data necessary to produce these metrics, which will be part of the recurring CCT review.

This webpage serves as a central reporting space for CCT metrics. Each metric includes the number it was assigned by the community in its recommendations [DOCX, 105 KB].

Not all approved metrics are included here, as some were incorporated into other efforts. In 2015, ICANN commissioned and published findings from several efforts at capturing metrics related to competition, consumer choice and consumer trust, including a consumer survey, registrant survey and an economic study. In 2016, a second consumer survey explored the same issues of consumer choice and trust, in an effort to determine if attitudes had changed one year later. Some, but not all, metrics include information about the period prior to the introduction of the first new gTLDs in October 2013, and will serve as a baseline of comparison for future data. Those metrics include a footnote indicating which period of the data is considered part of the baseline.

ICANN will update the metrics as new data becomes available. The update schedule is noted next to each metric.

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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."