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IANA Stewardship Transition Implementation

Implementation of the tasks required for the IANA stewardship transition and enhancing ICANN’s accountability is completed. This page provides access to documents and materials developed during the implementation phase. Follow the links below for more information.

TRACK I
: Root Zone Management (RZM)

TRACK II
: Stewardship Transition

TRACK III
: Accountability Enhancements

Based on the proposals by the IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG) and the Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN Accountability (CCWG-Accountability), ICANN identified work that must be completed in order for the IANA stewardship transition to occur. This work was mapped across 3 separate tracks. The below chart reflects the status of the work of ICANN and the community.

 

  1. The Root Zone Management track contains projects relating to changes to the root zone management system (RZMS) to remove NTIA's authorization process, parallel testing of the production and parallel test RZMS and the development, and execution of an agreement with Verisign as the root zone maintainer.
     
  2. The Stewardship Transition track contains projects to prepare relationship documentations with the operational communities, creation of a Post-Transition IANA (PTI) entity, establishment of a Customer Standing Committee (CSC) and a Root Zone Evolution Review Committee (RZERC), operationalizing the IANA customer service escalation mechanisms and SLAs.
     
  3. The Accountability Enhancements track contains projects to implement enhancements to ICANN’s Independent Review and Reconsideration Request processes, to update ICANN’s governance documents, and to operationalize new Community Powers defined by the CCWG-Accountability.

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Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."