ICANN is opening a 21-day public comment on the latest draft report “Examining the User Experience Implications of Active Variant TLDs.”
Based on the input received in this public forum, ICANN will produce a final report that incorporates the community feedback. The final report will be published within 30 days after the closure of public comment.
Comment Open: 18 January 2013
Comment Close: 8 February 2013
Close Time (UTC): 23:59 UTC
Section I: Description, Explanation, and Purpose
The IDN Variant TLD Program has been exploring 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.
Should ICANN activate variant TLDs in the root, many parts of the Internet ecosystem will be affected, with corresponding impacts on the user experience. Examples of user roles that have been identified previously include registrants, registrars, registry operators, system administrators, network operators, application developers, and end users. As the coordination body for the DNS, ICANN has a responsibility to investigate possible impacts of new developments, and to proactively identify and publicize potential issues.
To better understand and address these challenges, the report: 1) summarizes and compares, from a user experience and registry management perspective, variant practices in several ccTLD registries; 2) proposes a set of guiding principles to define an acceptable user experience; and 3) identifies how various users communities (e.g., end users, system/network administrators, application developers, registrants, registrars and registries) will be impacted by active variant top-level domains, and based on 1, 2, and 3, proposes a set of recommendations to ensure the security, stability and acceptable user experience for active variant top-level internationalized domains.
The latest draft report improves the following way from the interim report [PDF, 558 KB]:
Incorporated community feedback (through public comment), technical expert feedback, and additional input provided by Arabic registries, Devanagari registries, and Chinese registries.
Included a recommendation section that proposes a set of recommendations and guidelines for the introduction of IDN variant TLDs
The proposed guiding principles, the list of identified challenges, as well as recommendations are neither considered comprehensive nor final. By publishing this draft final report, we seek to establish a dialog with the community to refine these principles, impacts and recommendations.
Based on the input received in this public forum, ICANN will produce a final report, to be published within thirty (30) days after the closure of the public comment forum.
Section II: Background
On 20 April 2011, ICANN announced the IDN Variant Issues Project to explore 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. The project completed with the publication of the final Integrated Issues Report on 17 February 2012.
The IDN Variant TLD Program follows on from that work. The Program consists of several projects, and continues as a multi-phase multi-year program. The Program Plan was announced – after substantial public input and comment – on 23 August 2012.
This project considers the user experience implications when two or more IDN variant TLDs are activated (i.e., have resource records in the DNS). The study findings are expected to inform the formulation of rules and guidelines for active variant TLDs.
This announcement was sourced from :
http://www.icann.org/en/news/public-comment/variant-ux-18jan13-en.htm
