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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 6 December 2013

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Proposal for a Specification 13 to the ICANN Registry Agreement to Contractually Reflect Certain Limited Aspects of ".Brand" New gTLDs

6 December 2013 | ICANN is posting today for public comment a proposal requested by the Brand Registry Group to incorporate a new Specification 13 to the new gTLD Registry Agreement, which would be available to a Registry Operator that operates a TLD that ICANN determines qualifies as a ".Brand TLD".

ICANN Issues Advice to IT Professionals on Name Collision Identification and Mitigation

6 December 2013 | ICANN today issued comprehensive advice to IT professionals worldwide on how to proactively identify and manage private name space leakage into the public Domain Name System (DNS) and thus, eliminate the causes of name collisions as new Top Level Domains (TLDs) are added to the DNS.

Bulk Transfer of Domain Names from Pacnames Ltd to Net-Chinese Co., Ltd.

4 December 2013 | ICANN has authorized the bulk transfer of gTLD domain names from Pacnames Ltd to Net-Chinese Co., Ltd. due to compliance actions taken by ICANN that resulted in the de-accreditation of Pacnames Ltd.

Launch of the Extended Process Similarity Review Panel in the IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process

4 December 2013 | ICANN is pleased to announce the appointment of the members of the Extended Process Similarity Review Panel.

New gTLD Collision Occurrence Management Plan Frequently Asked Questions

3 December 2013 | ICANN publishes frequently asked questions regarding the plan to manage name collision occurrences between new gTLDs and existing private uses of the same strings.

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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."