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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 11 September 2009

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

SSAC Briefing: Display and Usage of Internationalized Registration Data

11 September 2009 | Webinar provides essential background for understanding global Whois issues.

Status Update: IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process Implementation

9 September 2009 | ICANN is pleased to provide a status report on the progress of implementation of the IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process.

Brussels Chosen for June 2010 Meeting

9 September 2009 | The Belgian capital of Brussels has been chosen to host ICANN's 38th international public meeting in June 2010.

Public Comment and Discussion: Document Publication Operational Policy

8 September 2009 | A public comment period has opened for 30 days on a proposed document publication operational policy for ICANN's international public meetings.

Upcoming Events

25 - 30 October 2009: 36th International Public ICANN Meeting - Seoul, South Korea

7 - 12 March 2010: 37th International Public ICANN Meeting - Nairobi, Kenya

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, July 2007 - June 2010

Adopted FY10 Operating Plan and Budget [PDF, 1.47 MB]

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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."