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Contractual Compliance Audit Reports

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Registrar Audits

2024 August Contractual Compliance Registrar Audit Report

2022 November Contractual Compliance Registrar Audit Report

2021 Registrar DNS Abuse Obligations Audit Report

2017 September Contractual Compliance Registrar Audit Report [PDF, 178 KB]

2016 September Contractual Compliance Registrar Audit Report [PDF, 238 KB]

2016 May Contractual Compliance Registrar Audit Report [PDF, 372 KB]

2015 September Contractual Compliance Registrar Audit Report [PDF, 258 KB]

Registry Audits

2023 August Contractual Compliance Registry Audit Report

2022 New gTLD Compliance Audit Report

2019 Report on the Registry Operator (RO) Audit for Addressing DNS Security Threats [PDF, 277 KB]

2018 March Contractual Compliance New Registry Agreement Audit Report [PDF, 280 KB]

2017 September Contractual Compliance New Registry Agreement Audit Report [PDF, 103 KB]

2017 January Contractual Compliance New Registry Agreement Audit Report [PDF, 141 KB]

2016 January Contractual Compliance New Registry Agreement Audit Report [PDF, 220 KB]

2015 Contractual Compliance New Registry Agreement Audit Report [PDF, 205 KB]

2014 Contractual Compliance New Registry Agreement Audit Report [PDF, 1.94 MB]

Audit Reports on Accuracy-Related Requirements

2024 Contractual Compliance Audit Report on Accuracy-Related Requirements

2023 Contractual Compliance Audit Report on Accuracy-Related Requirements

Prior Years Registrar and Registry Audit Reports

2014 Contractual Compliance Year Three Audit Program Report [PDF, 851 KB]

2013 Contractual Compliance Year Two Audit Program Report [PDF, 900 KB]

2012 Contractual Compliance Year One Audit Program Report [PDF, 322 KB]

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."