Skip to main content
Resources

ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 11 June 2010

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Draft Changes to String Similarity Review Proposed by GNSO Council – Public Comments Requested

11 June 2010 | On 10 June, the GNSO Council passed a resolution requesting that a 21-day public comment period be opened regarding a proposal to send the following letter be sent to Kurt Pritz, Senior Vice President, Services, copy to the ICANN Board, recommending that the Draft Applicant Guidebook version IV section on "Outcomes of the String Similarity Review" be amended to allow applicants to request an Extended Review under applicable terms similar to those provided for other issues such as "DNS Stability: String Review Procedure".

ICANN's First DNSSEC Key Ceremony for the Root Zone

7 June 2010 | The global deployment of Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) will achieve an important milestone on June 16, 2010 as ICANN hosts the first production DNSSEC key ceremony in a high security data centre in Culpeper, VA, outside of Washington, DC.

Upcoming Events

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, 2010 - 2013

Adopted FY10 Operating Plan and Budget

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."