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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 13 November 2009

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Announcements This Week

Apply Now to Join the ICANN Board, the Councils of GNSO and ccNSO, and the ALAC

13 November 2009 | ICANN's Nominating Committee (Nom Com) invites Statements of Interest and candidate recommendations from the Internet community for key leadership positions to fulfill ICANN's technical and policy coordination role.

Public Comment: CAC Proposed Amendments to the UDRP Supplemental Rules of the Czech Arbitration Court

11 November 2009 | The Czech Arbitration Court (CAC), an Approved Provider for the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) is proposing to amend its Supplemental Rules to provide for an alternative page limit and processing fee for certain UDRP Complaints.

Expressions of Interest in new gTLDs: ICANN seeks input and advice

11 November 2009 | ICANN is soliciting information, advice and proposed models as it considers soliciting expressions of interest in new gTLDs.

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]

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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."