.tel Reserved Names

There are a number of restrictions on the names that can be registered in .tel. Some of these are contractual requirements from ICANN and others are a matter of Telnic policy. Names which are reserved on behalf of ICANN are not available at the second level and at all other levels within the TLD at which Telnic makes registrations. Further details on the use of reserved names in .tel can be found in Appendix 6 of Telnic's registry agreement with ICANN. This is published on the ICANN web site at http://www.icann.org/en/tlds/agreements/tel/appendix-6-07apr06.htm.

The list of ICANN defined reserved names can be found here. In addition to this list, all labels consisting of one or two characters are reserved at the second level. Any labels containing hyphens in the third and fourth position (ie encodings of Internationalised Domain Names) are also reserved. The names of all current Top-Level Domains in the IANA database are reserved. The list of these names can be found at http://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt.

ICANN requires Telnic to reserve names of territories, distinct economies, and other geographic and geopolitical names. This list of reserved geopolitical names can be found here.

It is not possible to register domain names that do not comply with Telnic's naming policy. These registration requests will be rejected by the Shared Registry System (SRS). The .tel naming standard is documented in Section 3 of Telnic's Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). In summary, names in .tel must:

1. contain a minimum of 3 characters selected from the letters "a" to "z" or "A" to "Z" in standard US ASCII character set, the digits "0" to "9" and the hyphen ("-");
2. contain a maximum of 63 characters (excluding the ".tel" suffix);
3. contain at least one letter ("a" to "z" or "A" to "Z") in standard US ASCII script;
4. not begin or end with a hyphen ("-");
5. not contain a hyphen ("-") in the 3rd and 4th positions; and
6. not consist purely of digits.

It should be noted that parts of the .tel naming standard intentionally overlap with some of ICANN's requirements for reserved names: 1 and 2 character labels or IDN strings for example.

In addition, Telnic has a small list of names that it has reserved for itself. This list was compiled following consultation with Telnic's Interim Policy Advisory Group (iPAG). The names on this reserved list relate to the operation of the registry and the .tel system as a whole. Some are concerned with new features and components of the .tel system that are expected to be introduced following the launch of .tel. Therefore this list remains company confidential.