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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 1 June 2012

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Public Comment Solicitation for FY13 Community Travel Support Guidelines

1 June 2012 | Purpose is to provide community members with the opportunity to review and comment upon the proposed FY13 community travel support guidelines.

Protecting Trademark Rights in New gTLDs: Selection of Trademark Clearinghouse Service Providers

1 June 2012 | ICANN is pleased to announce that it is working with Deloitte and IBM on implementation of Trademark Clearinghouse services.

ICANN's FY 13 Security, Stability and Resiliency Framework

1 June 2012 | ICANN is publishing its FY 13 Security, Stability & Resiliency Framework for community review.

Period of 31 May - 10 June 2012: Public Comment Periods Approaching Closing Date

1 June 2012 | The Following Public Comment periods are approaching their Comment or Reply Period Close dates, 31 May – 10 June 2012.

Universal Acceptance of All TLDs – Prague Meeting

31 May 2012 | At the upcoming ICANN meeting in Prague we will not have a session specific to this topic on the universal acceptance of all top-level domains. Instead we are reaching out to groups such as The At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC), Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO) and others in order to schedule times to talk with them about the initiative and how they can help raise awareness.

New gTLD Update (30 May 2012)

30 May 2012 | The TLD Application System, or TAS, has now closed.

WHOIS Technical Requirements Survey - Draft

30 May 2012 | The Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Council's WHOIS Survey Working Group (WSWG) requests community input on the draft WHOIS Technical Requirements Survey.

TAS Interruption - Update (29 May 2012)

29 May 2012 | The TLD Application System, or TAS, is scheduled to close tomorrow, 30 May 2012, at 23:59 GMT/UTC.

Notice of Extension of ICANN Comment Period: ICANN Draft FY13 Operating Plan and Budget

29 May 2012 | ICANN has extended the ICANN Draft FY13 Operating Plan and Budget public comment period until 8 June 2012, with the reply period closing on June 15th 2012.

Upcoming Events

24 - 29 June 2012: 44th International Public ICANN Meeting - Prague

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Adopted FY12 Operating Plan and Budget

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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."