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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 12 February 2010

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Invitation for Public Comment: Proposed Strategic Initiatives for Improved DNS SSR and Global DNS-CERT Business Case

12 February 2010 | ICANN is opening public comment periods on two documents related to DNS security, stability and resiliency — a Proposed Strategic Initiatives for Improved DNS Security, Stability and Resiliency (SSR) and a Global DNS-CERT Business Case. Both documents are being published for community consideration and input in advance of the ICANN meeting in Nairobi, and ICANN will conduct an open consultation on the papers at the Nairobi meeting.

Public Comment: Registration Abuse Addressed

12 February 2010 | The Registration Abuse Policies Working Group has published its Initial Report. The Report includes concrete recommendations to address domain name registration abuse in gTLDs for Community consideration and input.

Two Registrars Lose ICANN Accreditation

9 February 2010 | ICANN terminated its accreditation agreement with two registrars ISPREG LTD and SBNames Ltd for failure to comply with the requirements of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement.

Updated: Call for Applicants for the Position of Volunteer Review Team Member

9 February 2010 | Extension of Application Deadline to 22 February, 2010

Upcoming Events

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

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

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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."