LOS ANGELES – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (lCANN) announced the release of the Recommendations for Managing Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) Variant Top-Level Domains (TLDs) as a collection of six documents. These recommendations have been developed by the ICANN organization with community feedback received during the Public Comment period, a press release by the Corporation stated.

A. IDN Variant TLD Implementation – Executive Summary 

B. IDN Variant TLD Implementation – Motivation, Premises and Framework 

C. IDN Variant TLD Implementation – Recommendations and Analysis 

D. IDN Variant TLD Implementation – Rationale for RZ-LGR 

E. IDN Variant TLD Implementation – Risks and their Mitigation 

F. IDN Variant TLD Implementation – Appendices (A: Definitions, B: Use of ROID, C: Limiting Allocated Variant TLDs) 

While the Internet community has often expressed a need for IDN variant TLDs, appropriate technical details and procedures have not been in place to support these. The ICANN Board resolved on 25 September 2010 that "no variants of gTLDs will be delegated ... until appropriate variant management solutions are developed." Subsequent work by the ICANN org and the community on the analysis of issues for Arabic [PDF, 1.06 MB], Chinese [PDF, 2.86 MB], Cyrillic [PDF, 1 MB], Devanagari [PDF, 461 KB], Greek [PDF, 354 KB], and Latin [PDF, 425 KB] scripts in 2011, integrated in the Integrated Issues Report (IIR) [PDF, 2.14 MB] (2012), identified two challenges: (i) there is no accepted definition for variant TLDs, and (ii) there is no 'variant management' mechanism for TLDs.

For the first issue, the Root Zone Label Generation Rules (RZ-LGR) Procedure [PDF, 1.39 MB] was developed with the support of the community and adopted by the ICANN Board on 11 April 2013 for implementation. The Procedure has been implemented and RZ-LGR has been developed for six scripts, while other scripts are being added as their proposals are finalized by the relevant script communities. This enables a transparent and predictable mechanism for identification of variant labels going forward.

For the second issue, the ICANN org has undertaken a detailed examination to develop a set of recommendations on variant management mechanisms for TLDs, which have been finalized based on the community input. The recommendations, in summary, include the following:

1. RZ-LGR must be the only source for valid TLDs and their variant labels.

2. IDN variant TLDs must be allocated to same entity.

3. Same label under IDN variant TLDs s1. must be registered to the same entity.

4. Second-level variant labels under IDN variant TLDs must be registered to the same entity.

5. Second-level IDN tables offered under IDN variant TLDs must be harmonized.

6. IDN variant label allocatable or activated under IDN variant TLDs may not necessarily be the same.

7. The registry service providers must be the same for IDN variant TLDs.

8. Existing policies and associated procedures for TLDs must be updated to accommodate the recommendations for IDN variant TLDs.

9. All remaining existing TLD policies must apply to IDN variant TLDs, unless otherwise identified.

These recommendations and associated analysis in the six documents will be presented for further consideration to the ICANN Board, anticipated in March 2019.