A uniform way to handle diacritics in domain names, similar to IDN Variants, has been a long-standing demand from several parts of At-Large, including the Canadian French-speaking territories. The asymmetry between Diacritics and Variants arose from the way the Latin Generation Panel has chosen to treat diacritic labels–as distinctly separate code points, and not as equivalents as with variant labels–mostly on account of security and confusability issues. In order for the end-user community to treat Latin Diacritics and Latin regular ASCII labels in special cases (eg. to treat Montreal and Montréal as the same thing), a policy needed to be developed as an exception to existing policy on variants.
In support of a 22 June 2023 letter from the ALAC Chair to the (then) GNSO Chair, a preliminary issue report was requested by the GNSO Council in May 2024, for ICANN org to assess all relevant issues related to the request. The Preliminary Issue Report was put out for public comment on 8 July 2024. Based on 41 public comments received, the Final Issue Report suggested a potential policy development process (PDP) to consider a single issue: In circumstances where a base ASCII gTLD and the Latin script diacritic version of the gTLD are NOT variants of each other, what mechanism is needed in order to allow a single registry operator to simultaneously operate both gTLDs?
The Latin Script Diacritics PDP was initiated by the GNSO Council in November 2024. The name of the PDP was later simplified to Latin Diacritics PDP (LD PDP) and its charter adopted on 19 December 2024. The PDP adopted an ‘Open Model’, and the first meeting took place in March 2025.
Given the similarity between on IDN variants and diacritics, the LD PDP builds on the work done by the two phases of the Expedited Policy Development Process on Internationalized Domain Names (EPDP on IDNs). The LD PDP first worked on defining the precise scope of the PDP, and developed a framework for differentiating variants and diacritics. The PDP subsequently went through the recommendations of the EPDP on IDNs to determine if they would apply to Latin Diacritics.
As of now, the PDP has completed iterating through the list of EPDP recommendations and has produced its initial recommendations. During ICANN84, it also ran through several Stress Test cases that examined different edge cases and worked on finalizing its initial recommendations.
The revised timeline for the public comment on the PDP’s draft initial recommendations [LD PDP Initial] Section X-2_ Preliminary Recommendations_Draft.pdf is January 2026, with submission of its Final Report to the GNSO Council targeted for August 2026 (as opposed to the original estimate of Nov 2026).
Next engagement opportunity:
- Public comment proceeding on the Latin Diacritics PDP Initial Report in January 2026