Home

IDN Variant Issues Project also called IDN Variant Program

The purpose of this program is to resolve many of the issues necessary to delegate variant TLDs. The program consists of multiple projects and phases.  The first IDN Variant Issues Project explored the issues associated with the potential inclusion of IDN variant TLDs in the DNS root zone, at the request of the ICANN Board and the community.  The first two phases of the project have been completed with the publication of the final Integrated Issues Report on 20 February 2012 and the project is now entering its next phase. 

ICANN created a program plan for next steps, posted it for public comment, and presented it in a session at the ICANN meeting in Costa Rica in March 2012.  Based on the comments, the project plan has been updated, and the team is sought input on the revised plan through another public comment process.  The updated program plan has now been posted with an announcement. http://www.icann.org/en/news/announcements/announcement-23aug12-en.htm

Background

On 20 April 2011, ICANN announced the IDN Variant Issues Project to document the issues associated with the potential inclusion of IDN variant TLDs in the DNS root zone. This project was initiated in response to a 2010 ICANN Board of Directors resolution.

Phase I involved the formation of six case study teams for the Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Greek and Latin scripts. These teams were comprised of community experts with support by ICANN and identified issues related to IDN variant TLDs for each particular script, resulting in the publication in October of six individual reports detailing the findings of each script team.

Phase II of the project focused on integrating those six case study reports into the Integrated Issues Report. To complete this phase, ICANN formed a coordination team comprised of experts from each of the case study teams. The coordination team advised ICANN in completing the Integrated Issues Report, which summarizes and categorizes the various issues related to the identification and management of IDN variant TLDs.

On 23 December 2011, ICANN published for public comment the draft Integrated Issues Report.  Following the public comment period, ICANN published a Summary and Analysis of comments received and the final Integrated Issues Report.

Document and Resource Links

IDN Variant TLD Program Plan [PDF, 576 KB]

Final Integrated Issues Report [PDF, 2.15 MB]

23 August 2012 Announcement: http://www.icann.org/en/news/announcements/announcement-23aug12-en.htm