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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 1 October 2010

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Review Teams for SSR (Security, Stability and Resiliency of the DNS) and for WHOIS (WhoIs Policy)

30 September 2010 | After careful review of the candidates' documents, the mandated Selectors for the Affirmation of Commitments — Heather Dryden, Interim Chair of the ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee and Rod Beckstrom, ICANN President and CEO — have reached a decision on the composition of the Review Teams.

Proposals Sought to Provide Costs and Feasibility to Conduct WHOIS Proxy/Privacy Relay and Reveal Studies

29 September 2010 | The GNSO Council is now exploring several extensive studies of WHOIS and has asked ICANN to estimate the cost and feasibility of conducting several studies proposed by members of the ICANN community and ICANN's Government Advisory Committee.

ACDR Proposal to be Recognized as an Official Dispute Resolution Provider Under the UDRP

28 September 2010 | ICANN has received a proposal from the Arab Center for Domain Name Dispute Resolution (ACDR) to be recognized as one of the official dispute resolution providers under the UDRP.

Continuing to Move New gTLDs Forward

26 September 2010 | The ICANN Board met in Trondheim Norway on 24-25 September, focusing specifically on new gTLD issues.

Upcoming Events

5 - 10 December 2010: 39th International ICANN Meeting - Cartagena, Colombia

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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."