While these are good to know about, the public comment period has closed, and all going well, the ICANN Board is going to ratify them at this meeting. The big news out of this is that, for the first time since 2010, ICANN will open the possibility of allocating and/or delegating IDN TLDs in scripts that have variants. That is a significant event for those parts of the world that are primarily non-ASCII in their expression offline and online, and who have different representations of the same word (I won’t get into defining variants in this post, it’s a huge rathole). In parallel, ICANN is also nearing the final stages of the next version of the IDN Guidelines, which are slated for ratification in the May-June timeframe. The effect of that will be binding on all gTLD registries that implement IDNs. -Ram *From:* Ajay Data <ajay@data.in> *Sent:* Saturday, March 9, 2019 12:51 AM *To:* ua-discuss@icann.org *Subject:* [UA-discuss] Managing IDN Variant TLD Dear All, ICANN announced the release of the Recommendations for Managing Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) Variant Top-Level Domains (TLDs) <https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/idn-variant-tld-implementation-2018-07...> as a collection of six documents. These recommendations have been developed by the ICANN organization with community feedback received during the Public Comment <https://www.icann.org/public-comments/managing-idn-variant-tlds-2018-07-25-e...> period. A. IDN Variant TLD Implementation – Executive Summary <https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/idn-variant-tld-exec-summary-25j...> [PDF, 70 KB] B. IDN Variant TLD Implementation – Motivation, Premises and Framework <https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/idn-variant-tld-motivation-premi...> [PDF, 391 KB] C. IDN Variant TLD Implementation – Recommendations and Analysis <https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/idn-variant-tld-recommendations-...> [PDF, 382 KB] D. IDN Variant TLD Implementation – Rationale for RZ-LGR <https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/idn-variant-tld-rationale-lgr-25...> [PDF, 497 KB] E. IDN Variant TLD Implementation – Risks and their Mitigation <https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/idn-variant-tld-risks-mitigation...> [PDF, 230 KB] F. IDN Variant TLD Implementation – Appendices (A: Definitions, B: Use of ROID, C: Limiting Allocated Variant TLDs) <https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/idn-variant-tld-appendices-25jan...> [PDF, 530 KB] Read more: https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2019-02-05-en I think, it may be useful knowledge for some members to read and be aware about this, as your inputs will be valuable while we deal with variants in future. Thanks. Ajay Data