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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 24 September 2010

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Public Comment: Community Working Group Report on Implementation of GNSO New gTLD Recommendation Number 6

22 September 2010 | The Cross Community Working Group (CWG) on GNSO Recommendation 6 has published its Report on Implementation of GNSO New gTLD Recommendation No. 6.

Request for Information Issued on Proposed High Security Zone Verification Program

22 September 2010 | ICANN is posting today a Request for Information (RFI) on the proposed High Security Zone Verification Program (the "HSTLD Program").

Global Policy for Autonomous System Numbers

21 September 2010 | The ICANN Board Executive Committee, on behalf of the ICANN Board, has ratified the Proposed Global Policy for Autonomous System Numbers, as sent by the Address Supporting Organization (ASO) Council to the ICANN Board on 22 July 2010.

Call for Expressions of Interest for Independent Financial Expert to Audit Committee

21 September 2010 | ICANN is seeking expressions of interest to serve as an external independent Financial Expert to the Board Audit Committee.

Upcoming Events

5 - 10 December 2010: 39th International ICANN Meeting - Cartagena, Colombia

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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."