Asia Pacific Top Level Domain Name Association

Industry:	Internet / Top Level Domains
Founded:	1988
Headquarters:	No. 1 Building 4 South 4th Street Zhongguancun, Haidian District Beijing, 100 190 China
Website:	aptld.org
Twitter:	@APTLDnews
Key People
Lim Choon Sai (SGNIC), Chair Ting Chen (CNNIC), Vice Chair Leonid Todorov, General Manager

APTLD is an abbreviation for the the Asia Pacific Top Level Domain Name Association. It is an organization for the country-code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) registries in the Asia Pacific region, first established in 1988 and incorporated as a not-for-profit in Malaysia in 2003. Presently, APTLD has 45 full and associate members.

Objectives

APTLD has the following objectives:

• To promote skills development and information exchange related to Internet domain names amongst members.
• To provide a forum to discuss policy matters affecting Internet domain name related entities
• To act as an interface with Internet coordination bodies and other bodies involved in the Internet domain name operation

Workings of APTLD

APTLD works as the forum of information exchange regarding technological and operational issues of domain name registries in Asia Pacific region. Also, as an interface to other international Internet coordinating bodies, APTLD fosters and elevates participation of Asia Pacific based ccTLDs in these global fora, as well as acting in their best interest in global Internet policy making process. APTLD is based on membership, and its activities are funded by membership fees

Involvement in ICANN

Though APTLD is not a part of the ICANN structure, most APTLD members hold membership in the Country Code Names Supporting Organizations (ccNSO).

APTLD pledged its full support of the Joint Process Agreement (JPA), which transitioned the handling of DNS responsibilities, earlier handled by the U.S Department of Commerce (DOC) on behalf of the U.S government, to a private organization such as Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). It also acknowledged the progress of ICANN in reaching the objective of fulfilling its limited mandate of technical coordination of the Internet’s naming and numbering resources.

It had also supported the independent functioning of ICANN without the direct oversight of the U.S government after the expiry of the JPA on 30th September 2009

Given the language diversity in the Asia-Pacific region, APTLD has consistently advocated and promoted adoption of Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) and related technologies and instruments based on the use of non-Latin scripts and taken a proactive stance towards development of innovative technologies behind them.

In 2007,APTLD also urged ICANN to implement a limited introduction of top level IDNs by taking some simple steps. The recommendations were :

• Allow every existing ccTLD to manage one additional territory or country specific ccTLD in a recognized non-ASCII script of their territory or country. The task of determining the name of the ccTLD should be handed to the local Internet community.
• It also urged ICANN to manage a six-month comment period so that the international community would get a chance to comment on and object to the chosen IDN ccTLDs, if they seemed at all irrelevant to the ccTLD. This was mostly done to avoid spurious names for ccTLDs.

The region also see numerous cases of delegation and redelegation of country-code top level domains and representatives of the APTLD community vigorously contributed to the operation of the ccNSO Framework of Interpretation Working Group which set up guidelines for the ICANN community in this regard.

in 2015 at the ICANN52 meeting APTLD and ICANN signed a Memorandum of Understanding to promote bilateral relations and enhance cooperation between the two bodies.

Internationalized Domain Name

Country code top-level domain

Country Code Names Supporting Organization. Develops and recommends to the Board global policies relating to country-code top-level domains (ICANN Bylaws).