Alliance designed to help Chinese companies apply for "dot.BRAND" top-level domains

ICANN SINGAPORE - June 20, 2011 - Afilias Limited, a global provider of Internet domain name registry and Managed DNS services, today announced that it has entered into a formal agreement with Chinese Internet services leader HiChina, a subsidiary of Alibaba.com, to help Chinese brands take advantage of ICANN's New TLD Program.

.INFO is the only truly global gTLD. The abbreviated word INFO translates into many languages and as such has international meaning. Therefore it is only a natural extension of .INFO's international nature that we rollout IDNs to meet market demand.

There has been a strong demand in the ICANN community for supporting an Internet that is not English-only. When the Internet was first developed, it was spearheaded by the US, and since then more and more countries have come online and adopted the Internet in mission-critical communications processes. Because of this, it is now time that the Internet expand with the overall globalization of the world's economy and offer improved solutions to non-English speakers.

IDNs are available in a minimum of 1 year registration and a maximum of 10 year registration.

The .INFO registry first and foremost ensures standards compliant resolution of IDNs in the TLD-root name servers. Those using IDNA-compliant browsers (i.e.: IE 7, Netscape 7.1, Mozilla 1.4, Opera 7, Safari 3.2, Chrome) are able to type in the encoded domain (e.g.: müller.info) into their browser, which will automatically convert the name into Punycode – the approved standard for converting IDNs into ASCII domains that can be looked up at the TLD nameserver

The ICANN guidelines mainly address the following issues:

• That the registry be compliant with IDN technical standards
• That the registry, where appropriate, observe the additional prohibited character rules specified by ICANN
• That the registry require the registrant to announce the intended language / script of the domain registered
• That the registry roll-out IDN in a conservative manner with regards to linguistic complexity and work with local language authorities to determine appropriate registration policies

Yes. One of Afilias' founding principles as a technology provider is that we provide proven, standards-compliant service that will enhance the user experience, and not deviate from adopted standards. Our IDN solution will meet the ICANN guidelines and we will continue to work with local communities to ensure that our technology solution is relevant to the needs of the market.

The .INFO registry allows IDN hostnames to be setup. The hostname portion is validated based on the IDN standards, however linguistic relevance (i.e.: the language tag) is not enforced at the hostname level. IDN hostnames are displayed only in Punycode through the Whois.

The "domain name" field will display the registered name in Punycode (e.g. probestück.info will appear as xn--probestck-w9a.info). Three additional fields will be introduced to the Afilias Whois:

IDN Script: The intended script / language (based on RFC3066) of the IDN as determined by the registrant (e.g. "de" for German)

Unicode Hex: The IDN in Unicode Hex format (e.g. U+0070 U+0072 U+006F U+0062 U+0065 U+0073 U+0074 U+00FC U+0063 U+006B)

Unicode HTML: The IDN in HTML entity format (e.g.: probestück)