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IANA Stewardship Transition Implementation

ICANN's objective for implementation of the IANA Stewardship Transition is to be as open and transparent as possible, and to work with the community from the outset of implementation to make sure the transition happens in a timely manner while respecting the IANA contract obligations.

Based on the current proposals by the IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG) and the Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN Accountability (CCWG-Accountability), ICANN has identified work that must be completed in order for the transition to occur. This work has been mapped across 14 projects grouped into 3 separate implementation tracks.

  1. The Root Zone Management (RZM) track contains two projects that include changes to the RZMS to remove NTIA's Root Zone Administrator (RZA) role, parallel testing of the production and parallel test system and the development, and execution of an agreement between and Verisign as the Root ZoneMaintainer (RZM).
     
  2. The Stewardship Transition track contains eight projects to prepare relationship documentations with the Domain Names, Numbering Resources andProtocol Parameters communities, creation of a Post-Transition IANA (PTI) entity, establishment of a Customer Standing Committee (CSC) and a Root Zone Evolution Review Committee (RZERC), and operationalizing the IANA customer service escalation mechanisms and SLAs.

  3. The Accountability Enhancements track contains four projects to implement enhancements to ICANN’s Independent Review and Reconsideration Request processes, to update ICANN’s governance documents, and to operationalize new Community Powers defined by the CCWG-Accountability.

Throughout the course of implementation, ICANN will provide ongoing updates on this page to ensure transparency of status, progress of implementation and engagement opportunities.

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Meetings & Work Sessions

Document Archive & Links

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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."