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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 10 September 2010

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Tokyo Presentations Published

10 September 2010 | On 26-27 August 2010, ICANN hosted its Asia/Pacific Regional Registry/Registrar Event in Tokyo, Japan. In the interest of transparency, information is available from the event.

New Registrar Accreditation Application

10 September 2010 | ICANN has modified its Registrar Accreditation Application. The new application, which is effective immediately, represents the first significant change in 10 years to the application process, and was introduced to meet requirements in the new Registrar Accreditation Agreement adopted in 2009.

At-Large Director Call for Statements of Interest Results in Globally Diverse Applicant Pool

9 September 2010 | The At-Large Board Candidate Evaluation Committee recently announced the initial results of the call for Statements of Interests for the position of the ICANN Board Director who will represent the At-Large community that closed on 6 September 2010.

ICANN 2010 Nominating Committee Announces Selections

7 September 2010 | The 2010 ICANN Nominating Committee has completed its selections for seven leadership positions within ICANN.

Upcoming Events

5 - 10 December 2010: 39th International ICANN Meeting - Cartagena, Colombia

About ICANN

ICANN Bylaws

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Strategic Plan, 2010 - 2013

Adopted FY11 Operating Plan and Budget

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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."