Unavailable Domain Name File Format Specification

This document specifies a file format for the storage of unavailable domain names and related details for a top level domain (TLD) name registry, designed to facilitate interoperability and reusability among domain name registries and registrars. The increased number of domain name registries and registrars, the greater number of reasons for domain names not being available, and to make accommodations for possible real-time communications issues between registries and registrars has driven the need for this standard sharable file.

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.

File format will be a comma separated values (CSV) file and MUST use the US-ASCII character set. See informational RFC 4180 and RFC 7111 for details on the CSV file format. Filename has two forms depending on content. For a file containing only a list of unavailable domain names in one Top Level Domain (TLD) the filename MUST be <TLD>-unavailablenames-<YYYY-MM-DDThhmmss>.csv. For a file containing a list of unavailable domain names in multiple Top Level Domains (TLDs) the filename MUST be unavailablenames-<YYYY-MM-DDThhmmss>.csv. For an IDN TLD <TLD> MUST be ace-encoded (i.e. in the "xn--" format). <YYYY-MM-DDThhmmss> MUST be the date and time (in UTC) the file was created indicating that all the names in the file were unavailable on that date at the time the file was created. The first row MUST be the column headings: TLD, Domain Name, Status. The remaining rows will contain the data (all unavailable names) from the registry in the following structure: <TLD>, <Domain Name>, <Status>. Where <TLD> is the TLD of the domain name, <Domain Name> is the string of characters that represent the unavailable name, and <Status> is one of four values (REGISTERED, REGISTRY RESERVED, POLICY RESERVED, IDN VARIANT RESERVED). If the <TLD> and/or <Domain Name> is an IDN it MUST be ace-encoded (i.e. in the "xn--" format). All domain name labels that are not available for registration in the SRS, for any reason, to the registrar channel MUST be included in this file.

Example of a file that contains unavailable domain names from a single TLD. FileName: example-unavailablenames-2016-05-01T010000.csv TLD,Domain Name,Status example,e.example,REGISTRY RESERVED example,ex.example,POLICY RESERVED example,example.example,REGISTERED example,xn--4gqvdy3r.example,REGISTERED

Example of a file that contains unavailable domain names from multiple TLDs. FileName: unavailablenames-2016-05-01T010000.csv TLD,Domain Name,Status example,e.example,REGISTRY RESERVED test,ex.test,POLICY RESERVED another,xn--4gqvdy3r.another,REGISTERED

The file format described in this document does not provide any security services.

The authors wish to thank the following persons for their feedback and suggestions: Christine Turner of GoDaddy Inc. Jody Kolker of GoDaddy Inc. Richard Merdinger of GoDaddy Inc. Mike Runcieman of Afilias Canada Wayne Beaver of Afilias USA