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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 2 September 2011

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Public Comment: Revisions to Conflicts of Interest Policy and Bylaws to Allow Board to Consider Compensation for Director Services

1 September 2011 | ICANN requests community input on both the proposed revisions to the COI Policy and the ICANN Bylaws that are necessary to allow the voting Directors on the Board to consider and receive compensation for their services to ICANN.

Search Has Begun for New VP

31 August 2011 | Thomas Spiller has informed ICANN that he will not be joining the organization as its Vice President of Europe. ICANN announced Spiller's appointment to the position on June 23, during its 41st public meeting in Singapore. A search for an appropriate replacement has already begun.

Public Comment: Phase II of Public Comments Process Enhancements

31 August 2011 | ICANN Staff requests community feedback concerning implementation plans for three specific Accountability and Transparency Review Team (ATRT) recommendations (#15, 16, and 17) that affect the way ICANN publishes and manages Public Comments.

Safe, Stable and Secure New gTLDs: ICANN Seeks Global Background Screening Services Provider

30 August 2011 | ICANN issued a Request for Proposal (RFP) to identify a Global Background Screening Service Provider capable of generating a thorough and timely background check for all new generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) Applicants.

Upcoming Events

23 - 28 October 2011: 42nd International Public ICANN Meeting - Dakar

About ICANN

ICANN Bylaws

Our bylaws are very important to us. They capture our mission of security, stability and accessibility, and compel the organization to be open and transparent. Learn more at www.ICANN.org.

Strategic Plan, 2011 – 2014

Adopted FY12 Operating Plan and Budget

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Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."