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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 11 October 2013

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Strategic Planning & Strategy Panels Schedules Updated

9 October 2013 | To provide more opportunity for community consideration and public comment on a draft ICANN Vision and 5-year Strategic Plan, the development schedule has been extended to accommodate two rounds of online public input, and community discussions at the ICANN Buenos Aires (November 2013) and Singapore (March 2014) meetings.

NGPC Resolution for Addressing the Consequences of Name Collisions

8 October 2013 | At its 18 May 2013 meeting, the ICANN Board adopted a resolution to commission a study to identify the levels of potential impact posed by each applied-for new gTLD on the use of TLDs that are not currently delegated at the root level of the public DNS.

Montevideo Statement on the Future of Internet Cooperation

7 October 2013 | Montevideo, Uruguay – The leaders of organizations responsible for coordination of the Internet technical infrastructure globally have met in Montevideo, Uruguay, to consider current issues affecting the future of the Internet.

Upcoming Events

17-21 November 2013: 48th International Public ICANN Meeting - Buenos Aires

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Strategic Plan, 2012 - 2015

Adopted FY13 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."