Hello All, ICANN recently called for Public Comments on DNS Stability: The Effect of New gTLDs on the Internet Domain Name System. http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-06feb08.htm This is actually part of the implementation of the new gTLD recommendations. One of the recommendations was around ensuring that strings added to the root don't have technical issues. Below is the current implementation suggested by ICANN staff for comment. (1) Rules for what characters are allowed in strings: - Labels must consist only of ASCII LDH characters (letters, digits, and hyphen). - Labels must be 63 characters or less. - Labels must not be made up entirely of digits. - Labels featuring hyphens in the third and fourth character positions must be valid Punycode labels using the approved IDNA prefix. - Labels must not begin or end with a hyphen. - Labels must not begin with the characters "0x" followed by a hexadecimal character. (2) Regarding file extensions (e.g .exe etc) - it is the recommendation of the ICANN technical staff to allow applications for TLD strings that may also be commonly used for file extensions. Regards, Bruce Tonkin