Skip to main content
Resources

ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 4 February 2011

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Pre-San Francisco ICANN Policy Update Webinar Invitation

4 February 2011 | Whether you plan to participate in the upcoming ICANN meeting in San Francisco remotely or in person, you're invited to a quick reminder of the background and current status of each major policy issue currently under discussion in ICANN.

Community Comment Invited on: Proposed "Process for Recognition of New GNSO Constituencies"

2 February 2011 | The ICANN Board's Structural Improvements Committee (SIC) is working to improve the process for evaluating new GNSO Constituency proposals by streamlining the procedures and according a larger role to community Stakeholder Groups. At the direction of the SIC, ICANN Staff is opening a 30-day public consultation forum, from 2 February through 4 March 2011, and invites community comments concerning any/all elements of the new process – including its procedures, sequences/steps, forms/tools, and evaluation criteria.

Updated: ICANN's Board and GAC to Meet on New gTLDs

2 February 2011 | RSVP to Attend ICANN Board-GAC Meeting in Brussels.

Careers

31 January 2011 | ICANN has removed the job opening Vice President of IT from its career page and put the position on hold.

Upcoming Events

13 - 18 March 2011: 40th International Public ICANN Meeting - San Francisco, CA, USA

About ICANN

ICANN Bylaws

Our bylaws are very important to us. They capture our mission of security, stability and accessibility, and compel the organization to be open and transparent. Learn more at www.ICANN.org.

Strategic Plan, 2010 - 2013

Adopted FY11 Operating Plan and Budget

A note about our terms of service:

We have updated our electronic terms of service to provide greater transparency and align with laws applicable to us. Learn more.

This site uses cookies to deliver an efficient user experience and to help us see how the site is used. Learn more.OK

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."