[To: ga[at]gnso.icann.org; announce[at]gnso.icann.org] [To: liaison6c[at]gnso.icann.org; council[at]gnso.icann.org] Please note that we today posted a new announcement of an area on the ICANN website - an area for universal acceptance of TLDs. http://icann.org/announcements/announcement-20mar06.htm This is part of an effort that has been underway for a while, to provide information to the community and in particular to ISPs, application developers, users, webmasters and others, about the complete range of existing top-level domains (TLDs) - so that these can be used adequately. As additional TLDs are incorporated into the root, a central and authoritative source for information on TLDs becomes increasingly important. Further, ICANN receives frequent inquiries regarding whether a given TLD is "real" or not. As such this new area contain a variety of information, including: (i) a list of the existing TLDs that are open for operation (both ccTLDs and gTLDs), (ii) a discussion forum to discuss what additional option we have to promote the awareness of all TLDs further, (iii) coming information for a)common problems and solutions, and b) a TLD verification tool, which application developers can use to query the DNS to determine whether a TLD exists or not. Please make sure that you provide your supporting organizations, advisory committees and any other working groups with a notification about this information. Please let Karen or I know if you have any questions to the announcement, or perhaps suggestions for added information to this area. Kind regards, Tina Tina Dam Chief gTLD Registry Liaison ICANN -- Glen de Saint Géry GNSO Secretariat - ICANN gnso.secretariat[at]gnso.icann.org http://gnso.icann.org