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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 16 September 2011

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

2012 Will See One of the Biggest Changes in the History of the Internet. Are You Ready?

14 September 2011 | Join ICANN, overseers of the new domain application and approval process, for an informative and thought-provoking discussion on all aspects of the new Generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) program.

Safe and Secure New gTLDs: ICANN Seeks Back-up Registry Operators

14 September 2011 | ICANN issued today a Request for Information (RFI) to identify potential Emergency Back-End Registry Operators (EBEROs).

Un petit déjeuner spécial sur le thème de la egouvernance

14 September 2011 | Nous organisons pour l'événement un petit déjeuner spécial sur le thème de la egouvernance, le mercredi 21 septembre à 8h30, au restaurant Ladurée (16 rue Royale, 75008 Paris).

ICANN Podiumsdiskussion in Berlin

13 September 2011 | ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom reist nun durch Europa, um über die Bedeutung der neuen TDL – vor allem für Unternehmen, Marken und Regionen – zu sprechen. Geplant sind Diskussionsveranstaltungen in London, Paris – und Berlin.

ICANN Leader Praises Brazil's Multi-Stakeholder Model of Internet Coordination [PDF, 338 KB]

12 September 2011 | Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's President and Chief Executive Officer today praised Brazil as one of the few countries that has adopted a multi-stakeholder approach to Internet governance issues.

Updated FY12 Operating Plan and Budget

12 September 2011 | Based on the Board's decision to approve the launch of the New gTLD Program and to open the application window on 12 January 2012, the application processing now extends into the 2013 fiscal year. Therefore, it became obvious that including the New gTLD revenue and expenses across FY12 and FY13 presents a more accurate view of the overall FY12 budget.

Upcoming Events

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

About ICANN

ICANN Bylaws

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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."