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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 11 May 2012

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Joint Brazilian Network Information Center/ICANN Project Leads to Faster and Safer DNS Resolution in Brazil

11 May 2012 | The Brazilian Network Information Center (NIC.br), in cooperation with ICANN has completed an improvement to the Internet infrastructure that increases the resilience to potential abuse or attacks on Domain Name Service (DNS) by boosting name resolution capacity.

WHOIS Policy Review Team Final Report

11 May 2012 | The WHOIS Policy Review Team, constituted under ICANN's Affirmation of Commitments (AoC) agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce, submitted its Final Report and Recommendations to the ICANN Board and this document has been posted for public comment.

Period of 10-20 May 2012: Public Comment Periods Approaching Closing Date

10 May 2012 | The Following Public Comment periods are approaching their Comment or Reply Period Close dates, May 10-20 2012.

TAS Interruption - Update (9 May 2012)

9 May 2012 | As we announced yesterday, ICANN has provided notice to all users to let them know whether they may have been affected by the technical glitch in the TLD application system, or TAS.

TAS Interruption - Update (8 May 2012)

8 May 2012 | ICANN is targeting 22 May 2012 as the intended reopening date for the TLD Application System.

TAS Interruption - Update (7 May 2012)

7 May 2012 | In recognition of the inconvenience caused by the temporary suspension of the TLD application system, ICANN will provide a full refund of the application fees paid by any new gTLD applicant that wishes to withdraw its application prior to publication of the list of applied-for new top-level domain names.

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24 - 29 June 2012: 44th International Public ICANN Meeting - Prague

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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."