Please be advised that on 19 February 2011 between 15:00 and 19:00 UTC, the .ORG Production System is scheduled for downtime to allow for the deployment of Cyrillic Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs).
Registrations of the Cyrillic IDNs on 19 February 2011 will be available on a first-come, first-served basis at 19:00 UTC. During this scheduled downtime, the .ORG Production System including the Web Based Admin Tool and WHOIS will be unavailable. Domains will continue to resolve as normal during this period.
Cyrillic IDNs (not including Spanish, German, Danish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Korean (Hangul), Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Swedish and
Chinese) registered between 19:00 UTC, 19 February 2011 and 19:00 UTC,
21 March 2011 (during the first 30 days of operation) will be placed on Server Delete Prohibited, Server Transfer Prohibited, Server Update Prohibited, Server Renew Prohibited, and Server Hold. These statuses will remain in effect until 20 April 2011 to allow intellectual property interests to file UDRP actions if warranted.
All Valid Legacy IDNs that qualify PIR’s .ORG Cyrillic IDN policies will continue to be unlocked to allow for registrar updates (including Language Tags). Beginning on 19 February 2011, during the registrar’s assignment of the Cyrillic Language Tag, the .ORG system will verify that the Legacy IDN Punycode string meets the corresponding policy profile of the Cyrillic Language Tag in the .ORG system. If this requirement is not met, the Language Tag assignment will fail. Upon valid Language Tag updates, the following statuses will automatically be removed from the domain – Server Hold, Server Renew Prohibited and Server Transfer Prohibited. The domain will then be added to the .ORG Zone File to enable DNS resolution (assuming it meets all other requirements for inclusion in the zone file e.g. minimum NS).
Legacy Internationalized domain names that are updated with a Language Tag must be updated with « thick » contact data, or risk possible deletion of the domain by the Registry.
Please note that all expired Legacy IDNs will auto-renew following successful updating of the Language Tag. If a registrar chooses to delete the domain, they must do so within the 45 day auto-renew grace period or prior to updating the Language Tag. Registrars are encouraged to ensure that adequate funds are available to support these auto-renewals.
During the downtime for the deployment of the Cyrillic IDN, all .ORG Legacy IDNs that have an expiration date prior to 19 February 2011, will have the expiry date reset to 19 February 2011. PIR is resetting the expiry dates of all .ORG Legacy IDNs so as to fulfill our earlier commitment to you of not charging for maintaining Legacy .ORG IDNs.
An optional OT&E environment is available as of 20 January 2011. The FAQs and Registrar Manual detailing the .ORG Cyrillic IDN have been provided to the registrars on 21 December 2010 and will also be available via Registrar Relations Area shortly.
Should you have any questions, please contact PIR Technical Support.
