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<p class="title">ICANN Establishes Forum on Allocation Methods for Single-letter and Single-digit
Domain Names</p>
<p class="docdate">16 October 2007</p>
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<p>As recommended by the GNSO Council, ICANN is commencing a forum on potential
allocation methods for single-letter and single-digit domain names at the second
level in gTLD registries. Examples include <a href="http://a.com">a.com</a>, <a href="http://i.info">i.info</a>, 4.mobi, <a href="http://8.org">8.org</a>. Since
revenue will result from this allocation, comments regarding the potential
uses for this revenue are also requested.</p>
<p>ICANN intends to synthesize responses
to the forum and present proposed methods for allocation of single-letter
and single-digit domain names at the second level for community consideration. </p>
<p>To be considered by ICANN, ideas on potential allocation methods should be
submitted no later than 23:59 UTC, 15 November 2007 to <a href="mailto:allocationmethods@icann.org">allocationmethods@icann.org</a>.
Comments may be viewed at <a href="http://forum.icann.org/lists/allocationmethods/">http://forum.icann.org/lists/allocationmethods/</a>. </p>
<p>The GNSO Council asked ICANN to initiate a forum on this issue after considering
a report of the Council's Reserved Names Working Group (RN-WG), which recommended
that "single letters and digits be released at the second level in future gTLDs,
and that those currently reserved in existing gTLDs should be released. This
release should be contingent upon the use of appropriate allocation frameworks.
More work may be needed. In future gTLDs we recommend that single letters and
single digits be available at the second (and third level if applicable)."
The GNSO is one of ICANN's primary stakeholder-populated policy making bodies.
The recommendations of the RN-WG can be found at <a href="http://gnso.icann.org/issues/new-gtlds/final-report-rn-wg-23may07.pdf">http://gnso.icann.org/issues/new-gtlds/final-report-rn-wg-23may07.pdf</a> [PDF,
713K].</p>
<p><strong>Background</strong></p>
<p>Currently, all 16 gTLD registry agreements (.AERO,
.ASIA, .BIZ, .CAT, .COM, .COOP, .INFO, .JOBS, .MOBI, .MUSEUM, .NAME, .NET,
.ORG, .PRO, .TEL, and .TRAVEL) provide for the reservation of single-letter
and single-digit names at the second level. ICANN's gTLD registry agreements
contain the following provision on single-letter and single-digit names. See
Appendix 6 of the .TEL Registry Agreement, <a href="http://www.icann.org/tlds/agreements/tel/appendix-6-07apr06.htm">http://www.icann.org/tlds/agreements/tel/appendix-6-07apr06.htm</a> ("the following names shall be reserved at the second-level: All single-character
labels.").</p>
<p>Letters, numbers and the hyphen symbol are allowed within second
level names in both top level and country code TLDs. Single letters and numbers
also are allowed as IDNs -- as single-character Unicode renderings of ASCII
compatible (ACE) forms of IDNA valid strings.</p>
<p>Before the current reserved
name policy was imposed in 1993, Jon Postel (under the IANA function) took
steps to reserve all available single character letters and numbers at the
second level for future extensibility of the Internet (see 20 May 1994 email
from Jon Postel, <a href="http://ops.ietf.org/lists/namedroppers/namedroppers.199x/msg01156.html">http://ops.ietf.org/lists/namedroppers/namedroppers.199x/msg01156.html</a>).
All but six (<a href="http://q.com">q.com</a>, <a href="http://x.com">x.com</a>, <a href="http://z.com">z.com</a>, <a href="http://i.net">i.net</a>, <a href="http://q.net">q.net</a>, and <a href="http://x.org">x.org</a>
) of the possible
144 single letters or numbers at the second-level in .COM, .EDU, .NET and
.ORG remain reserved by IANA. Those six registrations are an exception to the
reservation practice. Under current practice, these names would be placed on
reserve if the registrations were allowed to expire.</p>
<p>The RN-WG carefully considered
technical implications of releasing single-letter and single-digit domain
names from reservation, and engaged in discussions with technical experts as
the working group recommendations were being developed.</p>
<p>There are currently
265 TLDs in the root zone (19 gTLDs and 246 ccTLDs). Although nearly all
single-letter and single-digit domain names are reserved in gTLDs, 24% of ccTLDs
(60) have at least one single-character name registration. According to IANA,
out of 9540 possible combinations of single-character ASCII names (containing
26 letters, 10 numbers, but not symbols, across 265 TLDs), 1225 delegations
of single-character ASCII names exist in the TLD zones (See <a href="http://forum.icann.org/lists/gnso-rn-wg/msg00039.html">http://forum.icann.org/lists/gnso-rn-wg/msg00039.html</a>). </p>
<p>ICANN has received many inquiries from third parties seeking to register single-letter
and single-digit domain names, and has advised these parties that the names
are reserved. Through the establishment of the public forum described above,
ICANN is following its bottom-up, multi-stakeholder model to develop suitable
allocation mechanisms for the release of single-letter and single-digit domain
names as recommended by the GNSO working group.</p>
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