General

The First Come First Served (FCFS) Guidelines were established by the PublicRoot Consortium to ensure all TLD (Top Level Domain) requests in the INS (Inclusive Name Space) are processed in a fair and non-discriminatory fashion and that all TLD managers or registrants are treated equally. Under FCFS Guidelines the same rules apply to all requests.

All new and existing TLDs shall be approved for inclusion in all participating FCFS Root Zones. Exceptions to this rule are the inclusion of TLDs that might cause technical, legal, practical, or any other conflict. First Come First Served (FCFS) TLD delegations must ensure the universal resolvability of TLDs in the Public Root and INS. Universal resolvability means a user will get the same answer to the same query from any computer or device on the global Internet that subscribes to the INS Internet.

These guidelines are designed so that delegations eliminate TLD conflicts, duplication or collissions. The TapRoot Guidelines of the Top Level Domain Association (TLDA) are used by FCFS to resolve any conflicts in the delegation process.

The TLDA and TapRoot ensure the universal resolvability of all TLD data elements in the Inclusive Name Space.

The FCFS specifications and rules on the construction of a TLD label attempt to be as general as possible. All TLD delegations shall adhere to the guidelines found in RFC 1591 at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). TLD labels shall follow the ARPAnet rules for constructing a host name as amended by Section 2.1 of RFC 1123.

A TLD shall be constructed as a combination of alphanumeric characters, including the "-" hyphen symbol. TLD labels shall start and end with a letter or digit, and have as interior characters only letters, digits, and hyphens. At this time it is recommended that TLD labels be 28 characters or less.

While upper and lower case letters are allowed in TLDs no significance is attached to the case. Two labels with the same spelling but different case shall be treated as being identical or equal.

Two-character TLDs shall not be delegated. Two letter labels are reserved as country code identifiers under ISO 3166. The FCFS guidelines shall adopt the ccTLD delegations of IANA.

The FCFS system shall allow for the delegation of experimental numeric TLDs of one character and up to the maximum character length allowed for listings. These TLDs are issued with the understanding that they are experimental and may not work on all operating systems or applications.

Numeric TLDs should behave in accordance with the "gethostbyname () function Syntax Rules for processing an IPv4 Address or Host Name" as published by the Public-Root DNS Operations Working Group.