[registrars] Migration of RACE encoded IDN registrations for .com and .net.
Dear Registrars: A very important notice was posted by Verisign-GRS yesterday. Some of you who are affected may not have noticed it. I paste it here: ========================= 2. SRS Scheduled Maintenance expanded to include the IDN Standards Migration. VeriSign received approval from ICANN on the planned IDN Migration. Given this news, the commercial launch date for the release of the IDN migration is December 13, 2003. As part of the planned release, VeriSign will migrate to the IDN Standards, launch Phase II of our character variant solution and introduce email functionality for IDNs via the i-Nav plug-in. This functionality was originally deployed to the Operational Testing and Evaluation environment (OT&E) in August of this year. We apologize for the changing communication regarding our maintenance window and release. However, our release has been dependent upon receiving approval from ICANN. If you need any assistance regarding this release, please contact our customer service department or Product management team. The IDN Standards Migration begins on December 13th, the start of the Migration Transition Period. The Migration Transition Period will end in April 2004. For further details and updates, visit the IDN Web site sections at: IDN Standards Migration: http://www.verisign-grs.com/support/mdn/technology/migration.html. Character Variants: http://www.verisign.com/nds/naming/idn/learn/variants/ IDN News In our pursuit of the global adoption and usage of IDNs, VeriSign sponsored an IDN Software Developers Summit in early November in Minneapolis, Minnesota. VeriSign and other interested parties were encouraged by the results of the meeting and are in the process of forming a consortium to continue the work started by the IETF with the goal of deploying interoperable applications that include these IDN technologies. Participants in the summit included AOL, Microsoft (US), Sun, IBM, Qualcomm as well as JPRS, DENIC, and KRNIC and other registries. The group plans to produce a white paper that will set forth a plan for the adoption of IDN technologies into client applications. If you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact Pat Kane (pkane@xxxxxxxxxxxx) or your account manager. ================================== end quote: While those of us in Asia are most affected, many of the former ML registrations were made by registrars outside Asia. We all made these registrations in good faith starting on 9 November 2000, over 37 months ago. Our registrants have either given up and cancelled or are holding on in the hopes of this present announcement. As I read it, this announcement does *not* include the conversion to punycode. Let's hope that follows soon hereafter;-} Cordially, BobC ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "It doesn't do any good to run if you don't start on time!" "A stitch in time saves nine." "We're lost -- but we're making good time". City Slickers |