Today, ICANN posted a set of draft procedures describing how IANA will manage
the insertion, administration and removal of internationalized top-level labels
(as delegated A-records) in the DNS root zone. These procedures are intended
to guide an evaluation plan providing for the insertion and monitoring of sample
IDNs into the root zone later this year.

This announcement includes the draft procedure itself (IANA
Root Zone Procedures for Test IDN Deployment, and a draft
paper (IDN TLD
Root Server Performance / Tolerance) describing the negative
impacts to the DNS (tolerance measure) that, if observed, would trigger an
emergency revocation procedure. The revocation procedure provides for the rapid
removal of IDNs from the root zone if these negative impacts rise to the level
specified in the tolerance document. The Root Server System Advisory Committee
(RSSAC) is also analyzing the tolerance measure .

The public comment period is open until June 22, 2007 at 00:00 UTC. Following
the public comment period ICANN staff will revise these documents and publish
a final set of procedures that will be reviewed by ICANN Board of Directors
at the ICANN Meeting in San Juan (25-29 June 2007).  The procedure will
be implemented according to standard processes for newly adopted or revisions
to IANA services.

Public comments can be submitted to [email protected] and
reviewed at http://forum.icann.org/lists/iana-idn-process/.

Looking forward:

These papers are a corner piece in ICANN’s IDN Program that currently
is developing an evaluation plan for insertion of a set of temporary internationalized
top-level labels in the DNS. The evaluation plan will take into consideration
all received advise and requests from the past several IDN workshops at ICANN
meetings and other events. The evaluation plan will be posted for community
review before it is finalized and implemented.  The evaluation plan will
be posted prior to the ICANN meeting in San Juan that takes place on 25-29
June 2007.

http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-02jun07.htm