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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 6 January 2012

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

CEO Announces ICANN Stands Ready for New gTLD Launch

6 January 2012 | ICANN President and CEO Rod Beckstrom affirms that ICANN is ready to begin receiving applications for New gTLDs on 12 January.

Fellowship Application Round Opens for ICANN International Public Meeting 44 in Prague, Czech Republic

6 January 2012 | ICANN is now accepting online applications for the 16th round of the Fellowship program. Successful candidates will participate in the ICANN meeting to be held in Prague, Czech Republic from 24-29 June 2012.

Public Comment: Initial Report on Universal Acceptance of IDN TLDs

6 January 2012 | The working group is now seeking public comment on its Initial Report and will closely review all submitted comments to revise and assess its prelimanary stocktaking as part of the process to report on identified issues to the ccNSO and GNSO Councils.

Upcoming Events

11 - 16 March 2012: 43rd International Public ICANN Meeting - Costa Rica

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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."