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RDS Risk Survey

You are invited to participate in this survey if you provide or use gTLD domain name registration data, including Registrants, Registrars, Registries, and the broad spectrum of individuals, businesses, and other organizations that consume Whois data today.

This survey is a chance to tell the Expert Working Group on gTLD Directory Services (EWG) about the risks and benefits that the Next Generation Registration Directory Service (RDS) might have for YOU.

All risks and benefits identified through this survey will be published in aggregated, anonymized form and used by the EWG to refine RDS recommendations to reduce unanticipated and unnecessary risks and as input to a full risk assessment.

You may download a PDF of survey questions here:

This survey is now closed. A summary of survey results can be found here:
https://community.icann.org/display/EWG/EWG+Public+Research+Page

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Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."