[nc-idn] AMC-ACE-Z v0.3.1

[DannyYounger@cs.com]

Thanks to YJ for the IDN update.  The following may be of interest to IDN TF 
members:

VeriSign Global Registry Services (GRS) intends to move forward in the
Internationalized Domain Name Testbed by placing the IDNs directly into the
.com, .net and .org zones.  The zones will be populated with the AMC-ACE-Z
v0.3.1 representation of the IDNs.  Registrars do not need to modify any of
their current registration processes to support this change.  All existing
IDNs originally registered with RACE will be valid under the AMC-ACE-Z
encoding.

Deployment will occur from October 27th, 2001 through November 12th, 2001.
On October 27th, all existing registrations will have their associated
AMC-ACE-Z representation calculated and stored in the database along with
the current RACE representation.  The registration process will not change:
all new registrations will still be received in RACE, but will now have the
AMC-ACE-Z component calculated and stored in the database.  Reports will be
available on a monthly basis showing a registrar’s IDN registrations in both
RACE and AMC-ACE-Z representations. These reports will be posted to the
Registrar FTP site.

Because this deployment will require a modification to the zone generation
process, there will be a two-week parallel operation period to ensure that
the zone files generated under the new process are equivalent to the files
generated by the old zone process.

Upon completion of the parallel operation period, approximately November
12th, 2001, VeriSign GRS will take all IDN registrations off of
Registry–Hold status and place them on Active status, which allows the IDNs
to be selected by the zone generation process.  This change from
Registry-Hold to Active status will be a background process and will not
require an outage of the SRS, though it will require a few days to change
all IDNs to Active status.  In addition, all new IDN registrations as of
that date will be placed on Active status.

The next step in the testbed will be the migration of all IDN-certified
Registrars to the new ACE standard for registration.  We do not anticipate
beginning this process until there is an RFC from the IETF pertaining to an
ACE.  More information will be provided as it becomes available.  All
registrars will have ample time to prepare for this migration.

http://www.dnso.org/clubpublic/registrars/Arc01/msg01279.html