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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 10 February 2012

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Public Comment: Further Bylaw Changes Following Adoption of Revised Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Policy Development Process (PDP)

10 February 2012 | The proposed revisions are put out for public comment prior to Board consideration of incorporating revisions into the Bylaws.

Tell Us What You Think of the Nominating Committee

10 February 2012 | Take a few minutes and send us your thoughts via ICANN's 2011 NomCom Survey today. All ICANN community members are invited to participate.

ICANN Reaffirms Commitment to Second Round in New gTLD Program, Seeks Public Comment on Trademark Protections, and Moves Forward on Applicant Support Program

9 February 2012 | On 7 February 2012, the ICANN Board reaffirmed ICANN's commitment to opening a second round of applications in the New gTLD Program as expeditiously as possible.

ICANN Board Reaffirms Commitment to Open Second Application Window for Generic Top-Level Domain Program [PDF, 292 KB]

9 February 2012 | ICANN's Board of Directors has passed a resolution reaffirming the organization’s commitment to open a second round of applications for the New generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) Program as expeditiously as possible.

Volunteers Sought to Help Evaluate Generic Top-Level Domain Applicants Seeking Financial Support [PDF, 293 KB]

7 February 2012 | ICANN is seeking volunteers who will assist in the evaluation of those organizations seeking financial support to apply for a new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD).

Public Comment: Defensive Applications for New gTLDs

6 February 2012 | As the time of the opening of the new gTLD application window drew near, parties stated their perception that they will need to submit "defensive" gTLD applications as a means to protect their trademarks. ICANN is seeking public comment on the sources of this perception and how it can be addressed.

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."