Skip to main content
Resources

ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 11 December 2009

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

ICANN Signs Two Historic Agreements with UN Agencies

11 December 2009 | ICANN and the Swiss-based Universal Postal Union (UPU) have signed a historic agreement giving the UPU managing authority over .post as a top-level domain. In addition to the UPU-ICANN contract, ICANN also entered into another important agreement the day before in Paris with another U.N. entity, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

ICANN Continues Reporting on the Selection Process of Independent Evaluators for the New gTLD Program

11 December 2009 | Phase one of the selection process (e.g., general criteria scoring grid) has been completed and each candidate is being notified of their status and next steps.

ICANN Welcomes 100th Member to the Country Code Names Supporting Organization

8 December 2009 | On 3 December, ICANN's Country Code Name Supporting Organization (ccNSO) welcomed the Centro de Informatica da Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, operator of the country code .MZ (Mozambique), as its 100th member.

Announcement Regarding Implementation of Modification to Implementation Rules for Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy

7 December 2009 | On 30 October 2009, the ICANN Board approved a modification to the Implementation Rules for the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy ("Rules"). The modified Rules now require UDRP claimants and respondents to provide documents to UDRP Providers in electronic form. The modified Rules also change UDRP Provider obligations in forwarding hard copy notice to respondents in UDRP proceedings.

Upcoming Events

7 - 12 March 2010: 37th International Public ICANN Meeting - Nairobi, Kenya

20 - 25 June 2010: 38th International Public ICANN Meeting - Brussels, Belgium

About ICANN

ICANN Bylaws

Our bylaws are very important to us. They capture our mission of security, stability and accessibility, and compel the organization to be open and transparent. Learn more at www.ICANN.org.

Strategic Plan, July 2007 - June 2010

Adopted FY10 Operating Plan and Budget [PDF, 1.47 MB]

Sign up for ICANN's Monthly Magazine

A note about our terms of service:

We have updated our electronic terms of service to provide greater transparency and align with laws applicable to us. Learn more.

This site uses cookies to deliver an efficient user experience and to help us see how the site is used. Learn more.OK

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."