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[council] ICANN Establishes Forum on Allocation Methods for Single-letter and Single-digit Domain Names
- To: "'Council GNSO'" <council@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Subject: [council] ICANN Establishes Forum on Allocation Methods for Single-letter and Single-digit Domain Names
- From: "GNSO.SECRETARIAT@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <gnso.secretariat@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2007 19:59:13 +0200
- List-id: council@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Sender: owner-council@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- User-agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.6 (Windows/20070728)
[To: council[at]gnso.icann.org; liaison6c[at]gnso.icann.org]
[To: ga[at]gnso.icann.org; announce[at]gnso.icann.org]
[To: regional-liaisons[at]icann.org]
http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-16oct07.htm
ICANN Establishes Forum on Allocation Methods for Single-letter and
Single-digit Domain Names
16 October 2007
As recommended by the GNSO Council, ICANN is commencing a forum on
potential allocation methods for single-letter and single-digit domain
names at the second level in gTLD registries. Examples include a.com,
i.info, 4.mobi, 8.org. Since revenue will result from this allocation,
comments regarding the potential uses for this revenue are also requested.
ICANN intends to synthesize responses to the forum and present proposed
methods for allocation of single-letter and single-digit domain names at
the second level for community consideration.
To be considered by ICANN, ideas on potential allocation methods should
be submitted no later than 23:59 UTC, 15 November 2007 to
allocationmethods@xxxxxxxxx. Comments may be viewed at
http://forum.icann.org/lists/allocationmethods/.
The GNSO Council asked ICANN to initiate a forum on this issue after
considering a report of the Council's Reserved Names Working Group
(RN-WG), which recommended that “single letters and digits be released
at the second level in future gTLDs, and that those currently reserved
in existing gTLDs should be released. This release should be contingent
upon the use of appropriate allocation frameworks. More work may be
needed. In future gTLDs we recommend that single letters and single
digits be available at the second (and third level if applicable).” The
GNSO is one of ICANN's primary stakeholder-populated policy making
bodies. The recommendations of the RN-WG can be found at
http://gnso.icann.org/issues/new-gtlds/final-report-rn-wg-23may07.pdf
[PDF, 713K].
Background
Currently, all 16 gTLD registry agreements (.AERO, .ASIA, .BIZ, .CAT,
.COM, .COOP, .INFO, .JOBS, .MOBI, .MUSEUM, .NAME, .NET, .ORG, .PRO,
.TEL, and .TRAVEL) provide for the reservation of single-letter and
single-digit names at the second level. ICANN’s gTLD registry agreements
contain the following provision on single-letter and single-digit names.
See Appendix 6 of the .TEL Registry Agreement,
http://www.icann.org/tlds/agreements/tel/appendix-6-07apr06.htm (“the
following names shall be reserved at the second-level: All
single-character labels.”).
Letters, numbers and the hyphen symbol are allowed within second level
names in both top level and country code TLDs. Single letters and
numbers also are allowed as IDNs -- as single-character Unicode
renderings of ASCII compatible (ACE) forms of IDNA valid strings.
Before the current reserved name policy was imposed in 1993, Jon Postel
(under the IANA function) took steps to reserve all available single
character letters and numbers at the second level for future
extensibility of the Internet (see 20 May 1994 email from Jon Postel,
http://ops.ietf.org/lists/namedroppers/namedroppers.199x/msg01156.html).
All but six (q.com, x.com, z.com, i.net, q.net, and x.org) of the
possible 144 single letters or numbers at the second-level in .COM,
.EDU, .NET and .ORG remain reserved by IANA. Those six registrations are
an exception to the reservation practice. Under current practice, these
names would be placed on reserve if the registrations were allowed to
expire.
The RN-WG carefully considered technical implications of releasing
single-letter and single-digit domain names from reservation, and
engaged in discussions with technical experts as the working group
recommendations were being developed.
There are currently 265 TLDs in the root zone (19 gTLDs and 246 ccTLDs).
Although nearly all single-letter and single-digit domain names are
reserved in gTLDs, 24% of ccTLDs (60) have at least one single-character
name registration. According to IANA, out of 9540 possible combinations
of single-character ASCII names (containing 26 letters, 10 numbers, but
not symbols, across 265 TLDs), 1225 delegations of single-character
ASCII names exist in the root zone (See
http://forum.icann.org/lists/gnso-rn-wg/msg00039.html).
ICANN has received many inquiries from third parties seeking to register
single-letter and single-digit domain names, and has advised these
parties that the names are reserved. Through the establishment of the
public forum described above, ICANN is following its bottom-up,
multi-stakeholder model to develop suitable allocation mechanisms for
the release of single-letter and single-digit domain names as
recommended by the GNSO working group.
--
Glen de Saint Géry
GNSO Secretariat - ICANN
gnso.secretariat[at]gnso.icann.org
http://gnso.icann.org
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