Skip to main content
Resources

BGC ALAC Review WG Communiqué 20 May 2008 | Communiqué for 20 May 2008

Board Governance Committee ALAC Review Working Group

The BGC At Large Advisory Committee Working Group (WG) held its second meeting on 20 May 2008 to discuss with the independent reviewers their progress to date, and to plan Paris events related to the ALAC Review.

  • The WG received a status report on the independent evaluator’s efforts. Westlake is in process in the process of writing conclusions of the draft report, which will include all of the elements in the Terms of Reference. Development of the report is on schedule and a draft willbe provided to the working group in advance of the ICANN Paris meeting, and a final draft will be posted for discussion at the Paris meeting.
  • Vittorio Bertola has accepted appointment as WG Vice Chair.
  • The WG discsussed two workshops planned for ICANN’s Paris meeting - Monday 23 June 15h00 – 16h30 ALAC Review Presentation & Workshop, and Wednesday 25 June 14h00 – 15h30 BGC ALAC Review WG Workshop. WG discussion included the agendas and options for facilitating involvement and comments.
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."