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Assignment: Material Subcontracting Arrangement

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Please note that the English language version of all translated content and documents are the official versions and that translations in other languages are for informational purposes only.

A Material Subcontracting Arrangement is defined as any subcontracting arrangement that relates to any Critical Function (as identified in Specification 10, Section 6 of the Registry Agreement) for the TLD.

A change to a Material Subcontracting Arrangement refers to a change to any Back-End Registry Operator (also known as a back-end service provider or a Registry Service Provider), which is defined by the Registry Transition Process as an organization contracted by a Registry Operator to run one or more of the Critical Functions of a gTLD registry and includes service providers such as DNS providers. For the purposes of this webpage and the How-to Guide provided below, any provider of one or more of the Critical Functions of a gTLD (as defined in the Registry Agreement) will be referred to as a Registry Service Provider.

If a Registry Operator is contemplating both a Change of Control AND a Material Subcontracting Arrangement, the Registry Operator should begin working with ICANN early on, and prior to completing their transaction. Note, only the currently contracted Registry Operator may formally request a change to a Material Subcontracting Arrangement. However, both the existing and proposed Registry Operators are strongly encouraged to work collaboratively with ICANN to process the assignments.

Note that when evaluating a Material Subcontracting Arrangement: Change of Registry Service Provider, ICANN may refer the proposed Registry Service Provider to a Technical Evaluation Panel. Registry Operator would be responsible for fees incurred.

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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."