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Background on IDN ccTLDs

The Country Code Name Supporting Organisation (ccNSO) Council is establishing working groups to delve into various aspects of creating a global policy for the introduction of internationalized country code top level domain (IDN ccTLD) (associated with the territories listed in the ISO 3166-1). The IDN ccPDP Issues Report calls for the formation of two working groups, and the ccNSO Council recently confirmed the composition of the first, broad-based working group (Working Group 1).

Working Group 1

Many individuals volunteered to serve on the ccNSO’s new Working Group 1, which is charged with identifying and reporting on a feasible policy for the selection and delegation of IDN ccTLDs. During its telephone conference on 12 May 2009, the ccNSO Council confirmed the working group participants, which include members from the ccNSO, GNSO, and the At-Large community. GAC participation remains to be defined. (See table below for list of members and observers.) The ccNSO called for volunteers for membership in Working Group 1, inviting both members and non-members of the ccNSO.

Working Group 2

Working Group 2 will deal with the changes to Article IX and relevant Annexes in the ICANN Bylaws and will be formed in October 2009.

Members

Observers

AP Region

 

Gihan Dias, .lk

Hiro Hotta, .jp

Minjung Park, .kr

Ai-Chin Lu, .tw

 

Siavash Shahshahani, .ir

 

Tan Yaling, .cn

AF Region

 

Mohamed El Bashir, .sd

Nashwa Abdelbaki, .eg

Yann Kwok, .mu

 

EU Region

 

Andrei Kolesnikow, .ru

Maria Mokina, .ru

Vaggelis Segredakis, .gr

Nigel Roberts, .gg

NA Region

 

Becky Burr, NomCom

 

Keith Drazek, .us

 

LAC Region

 

Sandro Marcone, .pe

 

Rodrigo Saucedo, .bo

 

GNSO

 

Olga Cavalli

 

Edmund Chong

 

ALAC

 

Cheryl Langdon-Orr

 

Sivasubramanian Muthusamy

 

GAC

 

TBD

 

 

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."