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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 11 April 2014

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

ICANN Draft Five-Year Strategic Plan (FY16 – FY20)

9 April 2014 | Public comment is invited on the Draft ICANN Five–Year Strategic Plan (FY16–FY20) through May 2014. Built on community input received throughout an extensive, public strategy conversation, the Draft Strategic Plan proposes a new Vision, reiterates ICANN's existing Mission, and describes five focus areas with Strategic Objectives and Goals.

Call for Public Input: Transition of NTIA's Stewardship of the IANA Functions

9 April 2014 | Draft Proposal Based on Initial Community Feedback of the Principles, Mechanisms and the Process to Develop a Proposal to Transition NTIA's Stewardship of the IANA Functions.

ICANN Cross Community Working Group on Internet Governance's Submission to NETMundial

8 April 2014 | To obtain feedback from the wider ICANN Community on the Contribution to NETMundial from the ICANN Cross Community Working Group on Internet Governance.

The IANA Functions Explained – New ICANN Infographic

7 April 2014 | Click here to download the new IANA Functions Infographic. This new guide explains how these core functions allow you and everyone around the globe to utilize the Internet.

Upcoming Events

22-26 June 2014: 50th International Public ICANN Meeting – London

About ICANN

ICANN Bylaws

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Strategic Plan, 2012 - 2015

Adopted FY14 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."