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Technical Relations Working Group

The Technical Relations Working Group (TR-WG) was created by the Board in resolution 2011.03.18.29 to consider measures to enhance the coordination and cooperation between ICANN and other members of the Internet technical community with the intent of, among other things, dissolving the TLG by the 2011 Annual Meeting; and asks the Working Group to engage the ICANN community in a fully consultative process on the coordination and cooperation between ICANN and other members of the Internet technical community.

On 21 April 2011, the Board approved the Charter [PDF, 76 KB] developed by the Structural Improvements Committee for the Working Group (2011.04.21.12), subject to final adjustment of the Charter to include a step for further review and instructs the SIC, in coordination with staff, to support and follow the work of the WG.

Also on 21 April 2011, the Board approved the following members of the TR-WG: Gonzalo Navarro (chair), Thomas Narten, Thomas Roessler, Reinhard Scholl and Jonne Soininen.

At the Board Meeting on 25 August 2011, the Board passed resolution 2011.08.25.06, acknowledging receipt of the Draft Final Report [PDF, 255 KB] from the Board Technical Relations Working Group, dated 22 August 2011, thanking the BTRWG for its work and directing the Structural Improvements Committee (SIC) to analyze the report and propose a course of action.

At its meeting on 23 October 2011, the Structural Improvements Committee (SIC) found it advisable to have the Final Report posted for public comments to provide further basis for actions and recommended that the Board request such posting.

Therefore, in resolution 2011.10.28.10 the Board directed that the "Final Report from the Board Technical Relations Working Group" [PDF, 254 KB], dated 22 August 2011, be posted for public comments and a summary of comments received be provided to the SIC.

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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."