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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 10 June 2011

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Public Comment: Work Continues to Expand Developing Economies Participation in the New gTLD Program

10 June 2011 | The Second Milestone Report is being published for public comment. It deals with a very important issue: how can ICANN assist applicants from developing economies to increase their participation in the new generic Top-Level Domain (New gTLD) Program?

Request for Proposal Issued For Contact Center Platform Solution Provider

10 June 2011 | ICANN is issuing today a Request for Proposal (RFI) to identify a Contact Center Service Provider capable of supporting ICANN's New gTLD Applicant Support Center operations.

IDN Variant TLD Case Study Update

9 June 2011 | On April 20, 2011, ICANN announced its approach to move forward with the IDN Variant TLDs Issues Project. This project is dedicated to identifying the issues involved in the delegation of IDN Variant TLDs. We are pleased to announce the formation of six case study teams, comprising a total of 66 experts from 29 countries and territories.

Public Comment: The GNSO Council is Requesting Your Input on the New GNSO Policy Development Process

9 June 2011 | As part of the GNSO Improvements Process, which has as its objective to improve the structure and operations of the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO), the Policy Development Process Work Team (PDP-WT) has now submitted to the GNSO Council its Final Report that outlines the proposed new GNSO Policy Development Process in the form of forty-seven (47) recommendations, an outline of the proposed new Annex A – GNSO Policy Development Process for the ICANN Bylaws as well as a supporting document that is envisioned to be included in the GNSO Council Operating Procedures as the PDP Manual.

WHOIS Review Team: Call for Public Comment

9 June 2011 | In anticipation of the Singapore meeting, the WHOIS Policy Review Team wishes to solicit input from the Community on their Discussion Paper, which calls for feedback on issues identified by the Review Team.

Upcoming Events

19 - 24 June 2011: 41st International Public ICANN Meeting - Singapore

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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."