Skip to main content
Resources

ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 13 January 2012

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

ICANN Appoints New Vice President for Latin America [PDF, 355 KB]

11 January 2012 | Respected Mexican telecommunications and Internet expert Rodrigo de la Parra has been selected as ICANN's Vice President for Latin America.

ICANN Appoints New Vice President for Europe [PDF, 354 KB]

11 January 2012 | Highly-experienced governmental and regulatory expert Nigel Hickson has been appointed ICANN's Vice President for Europe.

New gTLDs Update: Applications Accepted Today; New Guidebook Posted; Financial Assistance for Qualifying Applicants

11 January 2012 | Starting today, ICANN begins accepting applications for new generic top-level domains (gTLDs). The world of .com, .gov, .org and 19 other gTLDs will soon be expanded to include all types of words in many different languages.

ICANN Community to Meet and Greet in Washington, D.C., January 10

9 January 2012 | As a member of the ICANN community, you are invited to attend an informal "meet and greet" with ICANN President and CEO Rod Beckstrom in Washington, D.C. Mr. Beckstrom will be in town as part of ICANN's ongoing efforts to promote awareness of the launch of the January 12 open application process for new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs).

Join ICANN for a Discussion on the Next Big .thing New Top-Level Domains and the Expanding Global Internet

9 January 2012 | On January 12th, ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, will open a process that could trigger a dramatic expansion of the Internet and launch a new era of online innovation.


Upcoming Events

11 - 16 March 2012: 43rd International Public ICANN Meeting - Costa Rica

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

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."