[jig] Universal Acceptance of All TLDs project

[Nadia Sokolova <nadia.sokolova@xxxxxxxxx>]

To Joint ccNSO-GNSO IDN Working Group (JIG WG):

A diverse team of ICANN staff members from several departments are working 
together on the Universal Acceptance of All Top Level Domains project. The goal 
of the project is to raise awareness of the acceptability issues with software 
on the Internet and to create an outreach campaign to encourage software 
developers and vendors, registry operators, network administrators and others 
to do what's in their power to remove these constraints so full resources of 
the Internet can be utilized. As part of this outreach campaign we will be 
conducting a round table discussion at the ICANN Costa Rica meeting. It is 
scheduled for Wednesday, 14 March 2012, 12:40-14:00. We hope that you can 
attend this session.


Overview of the project:
ICANN initiated the project when acceptability issues were first identified 
relating to the earlier rounds of adding new gTLDs. For example, some software 
and web sites have made the assumption that top-level domains were always 
either 2 or 3 characters long, which is problematic for a number of newer TLDs. 
More attention has been given to these issues with the adoption of IDN 
top-level domains, and with the expectation that many more ASCII and IDN gTLDs 
will be added to the DNS in the near future.

ICANN is conducting an outreach within the ICANN community to develop a plan to 
best improve awareness of these issues. As part of this outreach, we contacted 
the existing gTLD and IDN ccTLD registry operators to gather their feedback and 
share their experiences of what acceptability issues they've encountered or 
received reports of in the past. We have also updated the webpage dedicated to 
this project on icann.org and included the link to the Initial Report on 
Universal Acceptance of IDN TLDs prepared by your Working Group. Please see: 
http://www.icann.org/en/news/in-focus/tld-acceptance

In 2006, we developed some proof-of-concept TLD verification code that was 
written in several programming languages. We have posted the most recent 
version of this code on Github that will allow for collaborative future 
development at https://github.com/icann. This code is currently posted in five 
languages — Java, C, C#, Perl and Python. We are currently reviewing the code 
to make some improvements, and have plans to add new functionality as well as 
making the tools available in additional programming languages.

If you have any questions, please contact me at nadia.sokolova@xxxxxxxxx.


Nadia Sokolova
ICANN
mobile: +1-310-433-6376
direct: +1-310-578-8679
email: nadia.sokolova@xxxxxxxxx