On 20 April 2011, ICANN announced the IDN Variant Issues Project to explore the benefits and risks associated with the potential inclusion of IDN variant TLDs in the DNS root zone. This project was initiated in response to a 2010 ICANN Board of Directors resolution.

ICANN is publishing today for public comment the draft Integrated Issues Report, a study of the issues that this project has identified in relation to the management of IDN variant TLDs. It represents the result of the completion of the second phase of the project.

The first phase involved the formation of six case study teams for the Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Greek and Latin scripts. These teams were comprised of community experts with support by ICANN and worked on identifying issues related to IDN variant TLDs for each particular script, resulting in the publication in October of six individual reports detailing their findings.

The second phase focused on integrating those six case study reports into the Integrated Issues Report. To complete this phase, ICANN formed a coordination team comprised of experts from each of the case study teams. The coordination team advised ICANN in completing the Integrated Issues Report, which summarizes and categorizes the various issues related to the identification and management of IDN variant TLDs.

ICANN is now seeking community input on the issues discussed in this draft report. The report will be updated to reflect community feedback and the final Integrated Issues Report will be presented to the ICANN Board of Directors during their meeting at the ICANN public meeting in Costa Rica in March 2012.

On 25 September 2010 the Board of Directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) directed the CEO "to develop an issues report identifying what needs to be done with the evaluation, possible delegation, allocation and operation of gTLDs containing variant characters IDNs as part of the new gTLD process in order to facilitate the development of workable approaches to the deployment of gTLDs containing variant characters IDNs." (http://www.icann.org/en/minutes/resolutions-25sep10-en.htm#2.5)

In response, ICANN conducted six case studies of individual scripts to investigate any issues associated with delegating and using IDN variant TLDs that need to be resolved to facilitate a good user experience.

The next phase focused on integrating those six case study reports into the draft Integrated Issues Report, which is being posted here for public comment.

Documents posted for comment

• The IDN Variant Issues Project: A Study of Issues Related to the Management of IDN Variant TLDs

Additional Resources

• The original Variant Issues Project proposal 20 April 2011.