15(b) Describe the process used for development of the IDN tables submitted, including consultations and sources used

Prototypical answer:

The applicable IDN table developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC); C-DAC is a R&D organization of the Department of Information Technology (DIT) in India. C-DAC oversees regulations and policies on Indian IDN registrations, including standardization of the Hindi language tables, linguistic and variant mapping policies, and registration policies.

Afilias Limited, the registry backend service provider, evaluates IDN tables on 4 categories:
1. Conformance to IDNA: Afilias was actively involved in efforts to evolve the IDNA standards to ensure they are more responsive to technical and social needs, as reflected in RFCs 5890, 5891, 5892, and 5893. Each Unicode character, including variants, that are captured within the IDN table are analyzed against the IDNA protocol to ensure full compliance; examples of incompatibility includes characters that are prohibited in IDNA. Incompatible characters are excluded from the tables.

2. Completeness of the Table: Afilias determines whether the IDN table is complete, ensuring that there are no corner cases that may lead to confusion to end-users. In this process, specifically if variants exist, Afilias analyzes each character and its associated variants to ensure that each character produces the same set of variants. If all variant mappings and reverse mappings correlate, the IDN table is considered complete. Any exceptions are raised to C-DAC for further evaluation and recommendations.

3. Registration and Administration Policies: In the analysis of supporting Hindi IDNs, Afilias references a policy document produced by C-DAC: Internationalized Domain Names in Hindi.

Upon completion of the analysis, Afilias determined that there were no outstanding issues regarding the Hindi IDN table.

4. Registry Policies: Upon successful evaluation of the IDN tables and its registration policies, Afilias considered additional policies to ensure consistency of implementation, as well as to prevent potential abusive behavior to ensure a high quality of service.

These policies include:
• Identifying the maximum allowable Unicode characters for a given domain registration. The maximum length may vary for different scripts and is enforced to ensure the A-label does not exceed the maximum label length. Afilias solicits feedback from C-DAC to ensure the limitation does not impact the registrar, registrant or user experience.

• Identifying the maximum allowable variants permitted per IDN registration. The maximum allowable variants prevent malicious use of IDN registrations that may impact the quality of the registry service.

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