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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 9 August 2013

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Explore the Draft Next Generation gTLD Directory Services Model – Extension of Deadline

8 August 2013 | At the request of ICANN Community Members, the Expert Working Group on gTLD Directory Services has extended its open consultation period until 6 September 2013 – 23:59 UTC in order to provide the Community with additional time to comment on the proposed model and recommendations.

Rights Protection Mechanism (RPM) Requirements

6 August 2013 | The operational requirements for implementation of the Sunrise and Trademark Claims processes in new gTLDs, and a set of community-proposed revisions, are being posted for comment to give an opportunity for the community to review and provide feedback on these requirements.

Addressing the Consequences of Name Collisions

5 August 2013 | As directed by the ICANN Board of Directors on 18 May 2013, ICANN commissioned and today releases the results of a study that considers the likelihood and impact of name space collisions between applied-for new gTLD strings and non-delegated TLDs.

Proposal to Mitigate Name Collision Risks

5 August 2013 | To solicit community comment on proposed efforts to mitigate potential impact resulting from name collisions as New gTLDs are delegated into the root zone.

Publication of the Dotless Domain Name Study

5 August 2013 | ICANN is pleased to announce the publication of the Dotless Domain Name Security and Stability Study Report by IT Security firm, Carve Systems LLC (Carve Systems).

Upcoming Events

17-21 November 2013: 48th International Public ICANN Meeting - Buenos Aires

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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."