Received with thanks, AfTLD will be represented by its President Vika Mpisane. Best Regards On Fri, March 2, 2012 9:59 am, Gabriella Schittek wrote:

Dear all,

This is an invitation to a roundtable discussion to be held in Costa Rica on Universal Acceptance of All TLDs.

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Universal Acceptance of All Top Level Domains

ICANN staff members from several departments are working together on the Universal Acceptance of All Top Level Domains project. The goal of the project is to raise awareness of the acceptability issues with software on the Internet and to define the best ways of addressing these issues. In order to discuss what type of work and in which areas ICANN should focus its efforts on, we will be conducting a round table discussion during the ICANN Costa Rica meeting. This meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, 14 March 2012, 12:30-14:00 CST in La Paz A. We welcome in-person and remote participation.

Overview of the project: ICANN initiated the project when acceptability issues were first identified relating to the earlier rounds of adding new gTLDs. For example, some software and web sites have made the assumption that top-level domains were always either 2 or 3 characters long, which is problematic for a number of newer TLDs. More attention has been given to these issues with the adoption of IDN top-level domains, and with the expectation that many more ASCII and IDN gTLDs will be added to the DNS in the near future.

ICANN is conducting an outreach within the ICANN community to discuss the best ways of raising awareness of these issues. As part of this outreach, we contacted the existing gTLD and IDN ccTLD registry operators to gather their feedback of what acceptability issues they've encountered or received reports of in the past. More information on this project can be viewed here:

http://www.icann.org/en/topics/tld-acceptance

In 2006, we developed some proof-of-concept TLD verification code that was written in several programming languages. We have posted the most recent version of this code at https://github.com/icann which should allow for collaborative future development. This code is posted in five languages — Java, C, C#, Perl and Python. We are currently reviewing the code to make some improvements, and have plans to add new functionality as well as making the tools available in additional programming languages.

If you have any questions or comments on this topic, please contact us at tld-acceptance@icann.org.

Kind regards,

Nadia Sokolova ICANN

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