[registrars] ICANN Establishes Forum on Allocation Methods for Single-letter and Single-digit Domain Names

["Bruce Tonkin" <Bruce.Tonkin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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

http://gnso.icann.org