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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 1 February 2013

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Webinar: Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) Variant: Examining the User Experience Implication of the Active Variant TLDs

1 February 2013 | Project team has published for public comment the Draft Final Report for Examining the User Experience Implications of Active Variant TLDs and is seeking to establish a dialog with the community to refine proposed principles, impacts and recommendations of the study. This webinar is offered to complement that process both by presenting the key concepts and gathering user input.

Policy vs. Implementation

31 January 2013 | In order to encourage feedback on the ICANN Staff Paper Policy vs. Implementation – Draft Framework for Discussion, a public comment forum has now been opened. The received comments are expected to feed into the session that is being planned on this topic at the ICANN meeting in Beijing.

Strategic Planning Update

28 January 2013 | The purpose of this announcement is to provide an update on the strategic plan work conducted thus far and to outline the new approach to strategy introduced during the Toronto meeting.

Upcoming Events

7 - 11 April 2013: 46th International Public ICANN Meeting - Beijing

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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."