The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
(ICANN) has open comment on the proposed measures for letter cum letter
two-character ASCII labels to avoid confusion with corresponding country codes,
reports ITRealms.
ICANN in a press statement said that as per Section 2 of
Specification 5 of the New generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) Registry Agreement,
"All two-character ASCII labels shall be withheld from registration or
allocated to Registry Operator at the second level within the TLD.
Such labels, ITRealms gathered, may not be activated in the Domain
Name System (DNS), and may not be released for registration to any person or
entity other than Registry Operator, provided that such two-character label
strings may be released to the extent that Registry Operator reaches agreement
with the related government and country-code manager of the string as specified
in the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 standard.
The Registry Operator may also propose the release of these
reservations based on its implementation of measures to avoid confusion with
the corresponding country codes, subject to approval by ICANN."
This public comment, which opened on July 8 is expected to
close by 17 August 2016, just as it is to gather community feedback in order to
establish the list of measures a registry must implement in order to release
from reservation at the second-level of the domain name system letter/letter
two-character ASCII labels not otherwise reserved pursuant to Specification 5
Section 6 of the Registry Agreement.
“If adopted, all currently reserved two-letter second-level
domains would be released for all gTLD registries who implement the measures,” ICANN
said.
